io9: avatars

Electric New Surrogates Clips Show The Advantages Of Being Plugged In

Meredith Woerner — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 07:00:00 PDT

A brand-new Surrogates trailer and two clips show all the pros of having your own robot avatar. For example: being able to take a hit from a speeding car, or giving Bruce Willis sexy robo-hair.

These trailers and clips feel like the first time we're actually getting a taste of the Surrogates, and it's got that B-Movie flavor we've been missing. Let's hope it doesn't go flat. Surrogates comes out September 25th.

Peel Back The Plastic Robo-Skin Of Surrogates, With This New Featurette

Meredith Woerner — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 07:00:00 PDT

When your mind is inside a robot body that ventures out and lives your life for you, what's happening to the "real" you? Stop worrying! A new featurette from Surrogates explains the appeal of "a world without consequences.

Send your robot body to theaters to watch Surrogates on Sept. 25.

New Surrogates Video Peels Back The Fleshy Robot Skin For Further Investigation

Meredith Woerner — Sun, 10 May 2009 17:18:58 PDT

The future is bright for lazy homebodies and their robot avatars. Jonathan Mostow's movie adaptation of the graphic novel Surrogates has just released some violent robot footage, complete with hot Bruce Willis wig action.

In the Surrogates future, we all get to sit on La-Z-Boys while our robot servants, who look just like us except cuter, run our errands, work our jobs and even go to raves (which are apparently trendy again). Willis plays a detective, who's investigating a rash of robotic Avatar murders, and he'll appear both as himself and (wearing a wig) as his Avatar. Who is behind these murders? And can citizens survive outside on their own, if they even want to?

So what do you think? Is it a little too shiny? The comic appears to be a wee bit darker. Is anyone else getting a Fifth Element feel from this first glimpse of Mostow's movie?

Surrogates will be released in theaters on September 25.

Virtual Psychotherapy Works Better Than Live Docs

Michael Reilly — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 09:30:00 PDT

Teenagers would rather see a virtual shrink than a real one. So says Eric Wagner, a psychologist at Florida International University. Last month at a meeting of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) he unveiled his plan to cyber-rehab teenage alcoholics. Wagner's been helping kids through conventional therapy for years, but he says teenagers are notoriously tough to reach because they don't like talking to adults. Apparently he thinks kids might open up more to virtual world avatars than flesh-and-blood therapists. And he has proof, based on the success of virtual counseling for HIV-positive patients.

Developed by HIV/AIDS researchers at the University of California, San Francisco, the Positive Choice system helps reduce risky behavior among people living with HIV. Their method is sort of cheating (at least from a techie perspective) because it plays back video of a live-action 'doctor' actor to patients, but it's getting results. Here's what one of the study's authors had to say about their trial, which involved 917 participants at five hospitals around the San Francisco Bay area:

"Our most striking finding was that many of our intervention arm participants eliminated risky behaviors altogether—38 percent who reported unprotected sex at baseline reported no vaginal or anal sex without a condom after the intervention. Forty-four percent who had been using drugs at the first visit had stopped using all drugs at the conclusion of the study," said lead author Paul Gilbert, ScM, senior research associate at UCSF.

It'll still be a while for the technology to catch up (Wagner's system is in no danger of passing a Turing test). But people are getting more and more comfortable interacting with computers every day, so is it too soon to say we'll live to see a day when robots replace psychotherapists?

Source on Positive Choice: PLoS ONE, via EurekAlert

Source on Wagner study: original reporting for this post.

Photo: realtimearts.com