Virtual Immortality in XR: History, Present & Future Evolution

"Virtual Immortality" is becoming an important concept being explored by many new entities and organizations. Life documentation, 3D Scanning to create photorealistic avatars and various expressions of embodiment are rapidly evolving toward an exciting future where lives will persist beyond the mortal plane. Social VR, Virtual Theater, Musical performances, Storytelling, history and educational experiences along with a myriad of other XR/AR/VR/MR experiences will require dynamic, believable human simulations which act, and re-act, with enough precision to satisfy our complex neurologically ingrained perceptual needs as they relate to realistic and comfortable human interactions in synthetically generated and augmented environments, etc. The speaker will discuss the history, current state-of-the art development, techniques and future agenda evolving to support the field of human construct development, tracking and behavior, including physical 3D body / form capture, facial expression / body motion capture designed to inhabit interactive, immersive environments and scenarios. Acting / performer concerns will be discussed, as well as, the progress of available commercial technology needed to address the complex aspects of creating ideal, believable virtual personae and the desired habitation of these "constructs" into the virtual and augmented world(s) and what to expect from this process going forward. Current implementations including Meta's "Codec Avatars", Apple's "Persona" (available on the Vision Pro headset) and similar constructs will be described and discussed as they relate to XR, "spatial computing" and human experience and metaverse-related social communication paradigms.