Max Headroom style fake celebrity avatar plan seeks Kickfunding

Or you could lavish parental attention on pretend kids

A plan to create digitised people is less than a grand short of its $5K goal, and promising to create Max-Headroom-style characters from celebrities and personal friends, ready for early next year.

Max Headroom, for the younger readers, was an electronic avatar created to present the "What I Want To Know" show and prevent anyone noticing the human presenter had been murdered, but Sang Choi's aspirations for AsYouWish are rather more licentious as the WishPack additions demonstrate and the pitch video hints:

Presentation from AsYouWish on Vimeo.

The premise of AsYouWish is to monitor the mood of the user, though facial analysis and voice recognition, then use that data to select from a library of responses from the chosen celebrity or loved one (aka the WishPack), piecing them together to approximate real conversation.

Sang Choi suggests one might want to talk to a child when its not around, but the celebrity angle is more likely to appeal and while the technology might be a bit clunky now its not hard to imagine how it might develop.

As Bryce Lynch, the creator of Max Headroom put it:

"Soon I will be able to reconstruct anyone on the screen, even you Mr Mahler, so accurately that even your own mum would know it was you" to which the good Mr Mahler responds "my word, you could have all your politicians in little boxes... very handy". ®