Troy, N.Y. – Today’s video games and online virtual worlds give users the freedom to create characters in the digital domain that look and seem more human than ever before. But despite having your hair, your height, and your hazel eyes, your avatar is still little more than just a pretty face.

A group of researchers from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute is working to change that by engineering characters with the capacity to have beliefs and to reason about the beliefs of others. The characters will be able to predict and manipulate the behaviour of even human players, with whom they will directly interact in the real, physical world, according to the team.

Full article: http://www.physorg.com/news124368610.html

Morris Miselowski’s thoughts:

I know I keep going on about this, but this new study, other works being done that will allow avatars to move seamlessly between Internet sites  and our ever growing immersion in a synthetic on line world, all point to a rise of on line personal representation.

Within the next five years many of us will have a single avatar, just like we have a single mobile phone number, that will be our on line personal assistant and ambassador and that anthropomorphic avatar /figure will be a constantly evolving synthetic being that will learn about you as you interact with it and be able to, amongst many other things, conduct on line searches for you, communicate and answer rudimentary questions on your behalf and keep you up to date with your news, information and family events.