SYNTHESPIAN

The electronic characters in the film Toy Story and the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park show that computer imaging systems can generate extraordinarily plausible animated images. The next stage, presaged by that eighties creation named for a multi-storey car park sign, Max Headroom, is to simulate human actors with accurate depiction of movements and expressions; such a character is portrayed by William Gibson in his recent novel Idoru. It is said that minor characters in the backgrounds of some films are already computer-generated, but realistic close-ups of faces, for example, are still beyond the capabilities of the art. But nobody in the industry doubts realistic electronic actors will come soon, though the technique raises moral and intellectual rights issues. The word being used in the industry for such creations is synthespian, a blend of synthetic and thespian. In the USA, the word has been a trademark since the late 1980s of the Kleiser-Walczak Construction Co., whose principals, Jeff Kleiser and Diana Walczak, worked on Toy Story, Judge Dredd, and many other films, and have pioneered many of the techniques. Other terms sometimes used are cyberhuman and vactor (for virtual actor).