At first glance this article at Gizmodo looks like a fluff peice about a Japanese pop bad comprised of seven young women; however one of them is not real. She is a composite of the six real band members mapped onto an actors face. So while she might not quite be the full virtual Idoru of William Gibson’s book, the face does not exist except as 150GB worth of data. There has been another similar star in the form of Miku Hatsune, though ‘she’ was a full CGI persona attached to a synthesizer, a very graphical user interface if you will. Perhaps you are not into j-pop, but the implications for games will probably interest you. Where L.A. Noire is famous for the mapping of mouths during speech and individualized facial tics and tells, with this type of technology any face or combination of faces could be mapped to an actor. Character skins indeed.
"The fact is that yes, she looks exactly like the others. Literally. The big eyes, the juicy lips, the perfect cheeks, the cute chin, the blinding smile and the angelical look belong to the other six member of AKB48. Eguchi Aimi is not a real person, she has been composed in a computer using parts from her fellow band members. Her fans, who are legion, just learned about it this week, when this shocking video demonstrating the process, was published in YouTube. They just couldn’t believe it and you won’t believe it either:"
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