- Forget plastic surgery and revisionist personal history.
By 2010, people who want to dramatically change how others view them will
be able to project a "virtual reality" self.
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- Want to present yourself as a supermodel? How about a
giraffe?
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- And that will be about a year after computers as we know
them disappear, the result of increased miniaturization and the phenomenal
growth of technology. By 2020, processing power will be woven into clothing
or projected on eye glasses, contact lenses, even the retina itself. Artificial
intelligence will be far closer to reality.
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- Virtual reality will be a " well " a virtual
reality, Raymond Kurzweil said Tuesday during the International Conference
on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing at the Salt Palace. Signal processing
is an enabling technology for wireless communications, Internet connectivity,
speech recognition and artificial vision.
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- "Virtual personalities are something we will be
seeing quite a bit of," he said.
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- He believes that by 2010 "we'll all have full immersion
visual and auditory virtual reality," though tactile virtual reality
still will be limited. Some virtual reality exists today. Auditory virtual
reality began with the telephone, he said.
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- By 2020, you'll still be able to tell what's real from
what's not. But by 2030, as tactile immersion is achieved, there will be
"no clear distinction between virtual reality and reality," he
said.
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- If you think his ideas are the stuff of science fiction
or even that 10 years sounds too soon and changing yourself through virtual
reality sounds too nutty, take a deep breath.
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- Kurzweil is one of the most respected innovators of the
century. The inventor of the first reading machine for the blind, last
month he received the $500,000 Lemelson-MIT Prize. He's invented a software
program that creates art and helps poets, has founded eight successful
companies and has designed an artificial intelligence system to improve
odds investing in the stock market by studying patterns. (The ability to
recognize patterns and their context, he said, is where man still beats
machine. But as brain scanning capability improves, that will change.)
He's the author of "Age of the Spiritual Machine," a man who
touts technological growth and potential at the same time he warns of the
dangers it may bring.
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- The computer as we know it will become as obsolete as
an 8-track cassette because everything's getting smaller, Kurzweil said.
Eventually, transistors will be as small as a few atoms. Processing power
is doubling every year. The very near future holds "ubiquitous high
bandwidth."
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- As those factors merge, he said, we will be computing
all the time, though we won't use computers.
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- The emergence of virtual reality will let people choose
the physical image they want to project, and they can "go further
and be a different person" for fun, educational and other reasons.
It could be a useful tool and a new art form.
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- When you "enter" a Web site in the future,
you will actually enter it, he said, because they will be virtual reality
environments.
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