I haven’t seen The Irishman, but the video detailing how it was made has me absolutely enthralled. Watch, and see for yourself:
Cool tech, right? But it’s not just the tech that has me jiggling up and down in my chair. It’s the fact that another piece of Innerscape is becoming a reality! -dance-
If you read book 1 of the Innerscape trilogy, you may remember the scene, early in the story, in which Miira finally gets to see the ‘avatar’ she will use once she has been inducted into Innerscape. That avatar is based on her 29 year old self. In other words, her avatar has to be ‘de-aged’.
To make the story work, the Innerscape AI had to be sophisticated enough to create avatars so real looking that none of the Residents can tell the difference. That was one of the key pieces of tech in the story, and now I know that it’s possible, actually possible.
I cannot tell you how good that feels.
cheers
Meeks
Meeka's Mind 
January 11th, 2020 at 2:09 pm
I love how you sci-fi writers predict the future, which I guess is the point of sci-fi, to please a story in a very credible/consistent future.
I was all fired up to see the movie, then I read Candy’s comments, which rang so true.
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January 11th, 2020 at 5:28 pm
lol – I was the same, Anne. I wanted to see it so much. Then I read Candy’s comments too and the gloss faded. Special effects are wonderful, esp. if you’re a baby geek like me, but story comes first. Without that, everything else is just fluff.
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January 9th, 2020 at 5:29 am
Cool! You are ahead of your time 🙂
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January 9th, 2020 at 9:57 am
-grin- thank you!
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January 9th, 2020 at 1:56 am
I watched The Irishman but didn’t know about the tech involved (I just take special effects for granted as if the characters in the movie can just age naturally during the filming. Lol). That’s pretty cool. I hope you enjoy the movie. 🙂
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January 9th, 2020 at 9:59 am
I don’t watch many movies and only learned about The Irishman through the tech article that talked about the special effects. 🙂 If the movie comes out on video I might watch it, but like Candy, I’m not really into the whole mobster thing.
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January 10th, 2020 at 10:44 am
I played video games on my phone through most of it. Lol
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January 10th, 2020 at 12:49 pm
lmao – that says a lot! Ooookay 😀
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January 8th, 2020 at 5:45 pm
Yep, ‘de-aging’ actors is the latest CGI thing. Very cool! 😀
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January 8th, 2020 at 7:34 pm
Ain’t it just? I wish I had a mirror that did the same thing! 😀
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January 9th, 2020 at 3:25 pm
Or tiny little (microscopic) projectors that hovered micrometers out from our skin and changed our image on command. 😀
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January 9th, 2020 at 9:40 pm
Oh my god…now you’re speaking my language! 😀 😀
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January 10th, 2020 at 8:58 am
😀 … How about this then? Imagine a square/rectangular room with 8 projector bars from floor to ceiling at the four corners and bisecting each wall.
The bars create a three-dimensional grid.
Seeing as light is both photons and a wave form, the bars can project an image anywhere in the room even with other people in the room (because the grid provides the signal everywhere) and by condensing the photons and reshaping the wave the image becomes solid.
If the projection is detailed/sophisticated enough, down to the cellular level, you can have a living breathing ‘fully-functional’ person engaging with the entire environment. 😀
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January 10th, 2020 at 9:55 am
I’m….-blinks- not sure about ‘down to the cellular level’ but the rest? It’s brilliant, Widds. Where on earth did you learn all this? More importantly, may I use it? At some point I’d love to be able to give Jaimie [from Innerscape] a way out into the ‘real world’ that would allow him to interact
with Aki, at least to a point.
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January 10th, 2020 at 10:09 am
I thunked it up in my head 😀 … yep, you can use it, I have a story pootling around in my head using this kind of tech too. 🙂
We have CT scans, MRI imaging, ultrasounds, electron microscopes now. All those images they produce are stored in glorious technicolour as digital data. All that’s required is a sophisticated enough program to collate it and poof, your ‘cellular level avatar’ is good to go. The SF tech that needs to be ‘invented’ is the projectors that modulate the photon streams and wave frequencies … but if they could do it for the Doctor in Star Trek: Voyager we can do it for our stories!
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January 10th, 2020 at 12:50 pm
You, Ms Widds, are a genius. 😀
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January 8th, 2020 at 1:11 pm
Awesome!
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January 8th, 2020 at 10:31 am
Yes, the tech is totally cool. The actors get “un-aged” to play the characters’ pasts. BUT… This is where it gets strange… A friend pointed out the Robert De Niro “kicks like an old man.” And my friend was correct. When the character is young, one of his little girls witnesses him beating a man who accused her of shoplifting a candy (or something equally trivial). It is a brutal scene, but De Niro’s actual physicality in the beating scene is NOT the physicality of a young man. It’s an old man kicking with the face of a young father.
I will acknowledge that it is totally cool that Mira’s experience is “coming to life” in a way but the film itself is… (sigh). I lived on Sullivan Street in the heart of the Italian mob’s territory for years. I have ZERO romance for gangsters of any kind. I can tell you funny stories about Vinny at the laundromat running numbers or the guys in the Triangle Club, or my own naivete in not realizing that Vincent “The Chin” Gigante was pretending to be crazy by walking around the neighborhood in his pajamas & slippers, when he was really evading the eavesdropping police when he gave orders inside the apartments and shops on my street. But I feel no romance about the mob.
The Irishman is yet another mobster film that makes a big deal of the men who were cruel, violent, venal, and yet “really nice family guys.” I’m sorry, but I don’t buy it. To me, the best part of film is how his daughter rejects him because she sees who he really is.
Ultimately, it’s 3 hours of very fine visuals—including the reverse aging process—but the story, the characters, etc. are in the same old, same old that I try to avoid. This one is based on the memoir of a killer, as told to a writer and published after his death so there’s no consequences for his actions.
Enjoy the tech! But I offer caution on the film itself.
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January 8th, 2020 at 7:38 pm
Ugh. I haven’t seen the movie, and now I probably won’t either. I’ve never really understood the love affair with mobsters. I guess it started with The Godfather?
I wonder when we’ll get to the point of idolizing gentle men with integrity. I suspect there’s still a lot of caveman in the human genome.
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January 8th, 2020 at 9:39 am
OMG! This is fantastic!
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January 8th, 2020 at 9:42 am
Isn’t it brilliant? -grin-
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January 8th, 2020 at 9:25 am
Well done you! I don’t want to say I told you so, but I knew you were going in the right direction 🙂
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January 8th, 2020 at 9:43 am
lmao – hello Chris. Yes, you were right. I remember once asking you if Miira was sci-fi enough. 😀
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