PingRay's ON THE RADAR

Speaking of ... PingRay's Issue 2

Talking Heads

If you noticed a family resemblance between the responsive monsters in the Halloween Card Creator featured in PingRay's Issue 2, and the VHost animated talking heads that greet you on practically every third Web site…you are correct.

The parents of both offspring are a 5-year-old New York-based company named … appropriately enough for the wranglers of this cast of unusual characters … Oddcast.

According to Chief Technical Officer Gil Sideman, the ancestor of most of these characters was a George Bush "dress-'em-up" Flash-based character that Oddcast did before the 2000 election—initially as a technical challenge to simulate a 3D face in Flash, according to Sideman.

It caught on immediately, was emailed by zillions of people around the globe, and evolved into a line of “character products” that Oddcast has created…including a "Cheerioke" singalong for Cheerios), a Discovery channel trivia quiz with Albert Einstein, a virtual Elvis and many others. Today, says Sideman, more than 4000 customers use the VHost development environment.

The VHost characters have several remarkable aspects. The heads look quite lifelike, as if they resemble someone you know, and the way the eyes follow your cursor—a common-enough trick for Flash animated eyes, but startling nonetheless—adds to the feeling of awareness.

But the biggest trick may well be the reasonably realistic lip-synching, whether the voices have been pre-recorded or, as in the case of the Card Creator, when the text is typed in by the user and spoken on the fly by the characters. All of the voices are synthetic, Sideman says, created by text-to-speech generation. Oddcast uses software that analyzes the audio waveform and the text on the fly, to signal the appropriate lip movements.

In the near future, Oddcast will be offering more facial expression control for the VHost characters…so you will be able to input not only words for the characters to express, but emotions as well. Already, the company is in partnership with ICQ for users to create virtual avatars that can, among other things, express emoticons. And Sideman is particularly excited about Flash—and high-speed data access—on mobile devices.

Perhaps sometime soon, then, expect to see Oddcast VHost-ers showing up on your cell phone: George Bush trying to pitch Republicans to you, for instance. Or, maybe some day, lazy trick-or-treaters can send their Halloween avatar selves, delivering personalized, in-character Halloween greetings and showing appropriate expressions, to each cell phone in the neighborhood…and letting them know that someone will soon drop by to pick up the candy.

Speaking of ... PingRay's Issue 2

THE NET HEARTS HALLOWEEN

In America, holidays have their essential foods…and their essential media.

New Year’s Eve, for example. Essential food: champagne. Essential media: television. It’s hard to even imagine this holiday prior to the time when you could watch the ball drop from Times Square, live...as…it…happened. (Of course, the experience must seem multidimensional for those living outside the Eastern U.S. time zone.)

Christmas, of course, has many essential foods, but at least one essential media: movies. (Sorry, but we’re at a loss for similar media for either Channukah or Kwanzaa…plenty of foods, though.) Can you anymore imagine Christmas without “It’s a Wonderful Life” or “Miracle on 34^th Street,” than you could imagine it without eggnog? We can’t.

For Thanksgiving…duh…the turkey is king. And the media is, well, cookbooks. This holiday requires printed recipes as much as drumsticks.

And a July 4^th without a radio blaring at a cookout is as unthinkable as one without hot dogs or hamburgers.

Which brings us to the holiday at hand, Halloween.  (See PingRay’s Issue 2.)

Halloween food: so many to choose from, but let’s start with candied apples…plus, of course, every kind of candy the world has ever known.

The most essential Halloween media? Ok, let’s look at the essentials of Halloween:

Participants don masks of characters they’ve always wanted to try out for fun … often going from portal to portal looking for free goodies… and escaping, for a while, from what can only be called “the real world.”

Sound like any media you know?

The Net is already teeming with Halloween things…masks and stories and special “haunted” sites…but, arguably… the same is true for other holidays.

The difference, we suggest, is that all those broadband avatars and video blogs and serial podcasts and interface skins and massively multiplayer online role-playing games and morphing programs and transmitting video phones are making Halloween-like behavior…looking for treats, creating live stories in alternate worlds, “dressing-up” as someone you’d like to be…more and more abundant on the Net.

Broadband, and the need to dress up, are enabling parts of the Net to become a fulltime Halloween party.

Or, to paraphrase the best Internet cartoon ever:

On Halloween…as on the Net… nobody knows you’re a dog.