Want a chance at immortality? Virtual reality may be the answer.
A Czech tech company called Somnium Space is developing the technology to capture a customer’s personality and appearance for after death in what it describes as “Live Forever Mode.”
“If I die and I have this data collected … my kids, they can come in, and they can have a conversation with my avatar, with my movements, with my voice,” Somnium Space founder Artur Sychov told Vice. “You will meet the person. And you would, maybe for the first 10 minutes while talking to that person, you would not know that it’s actually AI. That’s the goal.”
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The project came to fruition after Sychov’s father was diagnosed with cancer in 2017. He expressed a desire to capture his father’s identity through VR and the blockchain. The tech founder claims the amount of data collected by VR devices is “100-to-300 times more than when you’re on a mobile phone.” The data would then be built upon the Ethereum blockchain to ensure the company is “completely transparent and understandable,” Sychov tweeted Wednesday.
This data would be collected by VR headsets such as the Meta Quest and haptic VR suits, according to Sychov. Somnium also has a partnership with Teslasuit, a haptic suit developer. The Teslasuit would allow users to receive electric signals similar to human touch and track biometric data, including cardio and stress levels.
This movement data, intermixed with vocal recordings, would be combined by the company with artificial intelligence to adapt it into an avatar. “We can take this data and apply AI to it and recreate you as an avatar on your land parcel or inside your NFT world, and people will be able to come and talk to you,” Sychov said.
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Although some may express concerns about sharing so much data with a company, Sychov said he did not intend to sell that data to advertisers. “We are a decentralized world,” Sychov said. “We don’t want to know your name. We don’t care about who you are.”
Somnium Space hopes to roll out the first “Live Forever” avatars by 2023.
