This post is slightly off our usual virtualization track, as it dwells into the emerging H2A conversion industry (Human-To-Avatar). Last week I attended the excellent Plugg event on innovation and entrepreneurship in Brussels (which happens to be organized by our editor-in-chief Robin Wauters). Now that his annual event is over, you can enjoy more frequent posts over here again. Robin pointed me to a mysterious booth on his exhibition floor. Dirk Callaerts, the president of Eyetronics gave me a short explanation of their amazing virtualization technology. I even got myself virtualized in a similar way as Brad Pitt, Tom Cruise, Angelina Jolie and Nicole Kidman. Major movie stars use these scans to get their face applied to stand-ins and stunt men. But also because the insurance companies require them to get virtualized, so that expensive movies can be finished, in the unfortunate event something happens to the leading actors.
For those who do not live on a film set, there are many application for this technology too. Think about the gaming industry or online communities. This seems a fun booth to add to the next VMworld exhibitor floor, so scanned virtualization gurus can boost the likeliness of their avatar in the ‘virtual pavilion’ or on their blog. Another market for these scans is to produce miniature physical copies of your virtual self. V2P anybody?. The cosmetics industry already knows vanity is a great revenue driver…
Now that I got my face virtualized, I am able to send stand-ins for those dangerous tech interviews in the heated hypervisor battle fields around the world 🙂