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Interactive Face For Big Brother
Tired of stiff, unmoving, iconic images of Big Brother? Take a look at Jeremiah, a virtual face that interacts with the people around him.
(From BBC)
Jeremiah is the creation of Richard Bowden, Lecturer at the Centre for Vision, Speech and Signal Processing at the University of Surrey.
"Jeremiah is a virtual face that attempts to emulate humans in the way it responds to activity. He is very childlike, he likes visual stimulus, says Bowden.""When he sees children running and laughing and waving at him, he smiles at them. If you ignore him, he gets angry. If you leave, he gets sad. And you can also even surprise him."
Jeremiah works on visual input, reacting in a preset way to a surveillance tracker system. He is a research experiment to see how a home surveillance system controlling lights, doors and other systems.
"If you get up at three o'clock in the morning, and you go downstairs, there are probably two things you are going to do: either going to the bathroom, or maybe you are going to make a cup of tea," said Dr Bowden.
Science fiction has done a few experiments with putting an interactive face on a Big Brother character. One early example is of course the great and powerful Oz, from the classic movie The Wizard of Oz.
(The Great and Powerful Oz)
Another example is from the classic Trek episode The Return of the Archons, in which a computer presents a wise face named "Landru" to help control the human populace.
(From The Return of the Archons)
Read Putting a face to 'Big Brother' for more information.
Scroll down for more stories in the same category. (Story submitted 11/11/2004)
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