Putting a Face to 'Big Brother'
From: BBC News - 11/08/2004
By: Roberto Belo

Experts such as Richard Bowden of the University of Surrey's Center for
Vision, Speech and Signal Processing believe a more natural mode of
human/technology interaction can be facilitated with avatars such as Bowden's
Jeremiah, a downloadable virtual face that reacts expressively to visual
stimuli. Jeremiah, which has been featured at the Future Face exhibit of
London's Science Museum, cracks a smile when people greet him, gets angry if
he is ignored, becomes sad when he is alone, and can also register surprise,
according to Bowden. This is not an indication of intelligence, however: The
avatar is responding to input from a surveillance tracker system in a preset
way. Bowden's team is working on a more advanced and interactive avatar that
will resemble a fish. Avatars could conceivably supplant the keyboard and
mouse interface once they are integrated with speech and voice recognition
systems. Bowden also envisions systems that can observe a person's behavior
over time to anticipate his actions and execute assistive functions, such as
switching on the kettle if he plans to make a cup of tea. Some of the
technology's implications sound Orwellian, but Bowden says a human avatar
might assuage such fears. He recalls that people in his center were
uncomfortable when surveillance cameras were installed, but nobody objected
to Jeremiah's presence, "because although it's still watching them, they
could see what it was watching."  

http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/technology/3982367.stm