**Virtual Being Modalities**
*I will try to explain what this is, and why I’m posting it. I have posted various versions of this over the past two years. I am very interested in the history of virtual beings, where they came from. I am also interested in all the tips and tricks of the masters. Virtual beings have largely come to us, and are still coming to us, through film and special effects. In terms of dollars, the money is still in film and special effects, for the time being. For the most part virtual beings in film live in the past in the sense that they are recorded for playback. However, inside virtual production they are created in real-time. For the most part, they are created, certainly in terms of the behavioral component, by human mocap (human-inhabited virtual humans). The end-product of virtual production is not real-time, but recorded in linear fashion to be viewed only from beginning to end.*
*Of course there are many ways of fudging real-time, and tricking people into fake interactivity, for instance recording many segments and playing them back selectively.*
*Real-time we recognize in the human-inhabited avatars of virtual worlds, which especially resulting from the pandemic are morphing into telepresence, teleportation or holoportation. However, consumption of the products is still largely in the form of asynchronous recordings (think vtubers). The conclusion I arrived at in my forthcoming Master dissertation is that “holoportation” will become a ubiquitous form of telecommunication, due to the increased bandwidth of 5G, etc. Once this real-time infrastructure is widely available, it should not be long before we start to see human-inhabited avatars being replaced with AI-inhabited avatars, essentially virtual robots. (This is one reason why I see the so-called Metaverse as a tangent, or distraction.)*