Talking Heads

If you soon come across a hamster reading the headlines on an online news service, you can credit (or blame) Anthropics Technology (www.anthropics.com). The London company's product, Synthactor, allows you to capture real-life video images and transmit them through the narrowest of bandwidths, including existing mobile phone networks. Indeed, a Synthactor image and voice transmission uses less bandwidth than a typical mobile phone call.

Anthropics' technology "achieves extraordinary levels of compression," says James Booth, the company's marketing head. By concentrating only on the face and shoulders, the software targets key points of the image to give it verisimilitude sans the herky-jerky, stilted images normally associated with online video. What comes across is a head that moves and talks realistically.

Booth says the software is dead simple to use too and requires only a video camera and a PC. Once a video image is captured, it can also be manipulated. So, the video face can be made to look older or younger, fatter or thinner — the image can even undergo a sex change. An e-commerce site could film an actor and either use his or her image as its online sales representative, or create its own idealized human face to help customers online. An online news service might give users a selection of news readers to choose from, say, a pretty young woman or a middle-aged man. Or users could create their own image-perfect news anchors. "You could even have a hamster reading the news," Booth jokes.

Anthropics was launched about 18 months ago. Its origins are within Britain's National Film and Television School, which in 1997 founded a public-private company, Createc, to look for future uses for digital media, using research from the universities of Oxford, Cambridge and Manchester. Anthropics was set up to commercialize that technology. There are other companies also doing video imaging, but most are concentrating on 3-D technologies that create synthetic images that are less life-like, Booth maintains. "We are delivering video."

For the time being, Anthropics is focused on licensing its software to businesses, including Internet service providers, wireless services and telcos, who can then offer it to their clients. "But we may eventually target consumers," Booth says. Potential applications include video chat rooms, e-mail, messaging, distance education and, of course, e-commerce.

Anthropics has already set up operations in the United States. Its American CEO Dylan Kohler, is a former DreamWorks and Disney executive who won an Oscar for his contributions to computer animation technology. The company also is set to expand elsewhere into Europe and into Japan.

Although the technology currently works only with taped video, Anthropics expects to soon offer software that can alter images in real time. So, for instance, if you phone a call center on your mobile phone and talk to a rep who is 18 and pimply, the video image you see may be a Brad Pitt lookalike. And if you're watching a live news broadcast online, you can swap the dull, middle-aged newsreader for a hamster.