A Czech VR company is devising a way for people to live on into eternity in the metaverse. The company called Somnium Space makes VR products built on the blockchain and uses NFTs to allow people to buy virtual real estate to build/store virtual assets, including homes.
According to an interview with Vice, the company is hoping to expand beyond this space by launching a “Live Forever” mode, which allows people to create digital avatars that mimic their appearance, voice, and personality.
Artur Sychov, the CEO of Somnium Space, wanted to find a way to store someone’s personality posthumously after he lost his father to cancer a few years ago. The result is an AI construct that can interact with friends and family members in a believable way — at least for a short time. As Sychov said in an interview with Vice: “You will meet the person. And you would, maybe for the first 10 minutes while talking to that person, you would not know that it’s actually AI. That’s the goal.”
The company will accomplish this by collecting an extraordinary amount of data. The company will need to harvest all sorts of personal data including conversations, movements, and facial expressions. With enough data, Somnium Space hopes to create a digital avatar that can have at least a short conversation before it’s clear the person is a computer program.
Having yourself recorded in this way can be pretty unsettling, especially in a time when people are more concerned about their online data and how it is used. Sychov doesn’t believe it should be a concern, though. At any time someone can opt out of the program and have the data deleted entirely. Since the company runs on the blockchain, he also believes the company’s operations are transparent and trustworthy, especially since the company doesn’t sell your data to other companies.
Of course, privacy-focused companies have been caught selling data in the past. For those open to the world of blockchain and the potential of the metaverse, though, Somnium Space’s Live Forever mode is an interesting idea that shows the potential of the budding industry.
