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Originally Posted by darryl
Maybe we have stumbled on the explanation for all these zombie memes floating around?
On a more serious note, this trend will not of course be confined to books. In music we have already had a dead crooner sing a duet with his still living daughter. How long before we see new movies starring Elvis Presley or Marilyn Monroe?
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It's been done...with limits.
Aside from the REBEL ONE snippets of Peter Cushing and young Carrie Fisher, there's been commercials with Audrey Hepburn, Gene Kelly, John Wayne, and others. Mostly working off existing footage.
The second TRON movie featured a digital young Jeff Bridges facing off the older actor but it featured motion capture of Bridges for the digital character.
The challenge of digital actors isn't so much the visual fidelity--that much is here, more or less--but rather the acting part. That much is still a ways off. People have distinct body language, microgestures, acting styles... A pure digital actor would need to replicate them properly. And that is before you get around to directing the actor. Even with purely artificial characters that don't have to replicate an established personality the acting relies on motion capture of a real human.
For a full digital performance, something like THE CONGRESS proposes, we are still a couple decades away. We are taking baby steps in that direction in video games' on the fly cutscenes that animate player defined characters (MASS EFFECT, for example) but that has a ways to go (MASS EFFECT ANDROMEDA).
Here's one report on the matter:
http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/201...-in-a-new-film