Real-world beaming: The risk of avatar and robot crime

Media captionA demonstration of how robot 'beaming' technology works


"Beam me up Scotty" - that simple phrase reminds us of Captain Kirk, whisked from alien worlds back to the Starship Enterprise via the magic of "teleporting", in the cult TV series Star Trek.



Motion capture technology - such as the Microsoft Kinect games console - robots, 3D glasses and special haptic suits with body sensors can all be used to create a rich, realistic experience, that reproduces that holy grail - "presence".

The kit is getting cheaper all the time and researchers expect that in the near future it will be quite easy to set up a beaming-enabled room in a typical home. Beaming may also use less bandwidth than conventional video streaming.



The technology is already good enough for "blocking" a play - working out how the actors should move around the stage - though emotion and facial expressions are not yet captured accurately enough to replace a traditional rehearsal. This may not be far off, however.

Teleconferencing would be transformed, once beaming is able to convey the non-verbal communication that people value, reducing the need for businessmen to jet around the world.

The cinema experience could also be "augmented".

In Aldous Huxley's science fiction classic Brave New World characters enjoy the "feelies" - films that thrill with sensations of touch and smell as well as sound and vision. Beaming might one day deliver something comparable. And imagine what erotic movies could do with that.

There are many other areas where the technology has obvious applications.

Beaming sessions could help military morale by giving soldiers based overseas a sense of being back home with their loved ones. The same would apply to workers or businessmen posted abroad.

A virtual doctor could visit a patient at home, if that patient is unable to travel to the surgery.

Surgeons can already perform operations via telemedicine and beaming might not only make that routine but also enable medical students in different countries to get hands-on training simultaneously.

But this also raises the possibility of new types of crime.


Law researcher Ray Purdy says you might get a new type of cyber crime, where lovers have consensual sexual contact via beaming and a hacker hijacks the man's avatar to have virtual sex with the woman.



"Clearly, laws might have to adapt to the fact that certain crimes can be committed at a distance, via the use of beamed technologies," he says.


Image caption A performing 3D image of deceased rapper Tupac Shakur (right) amazed fans in California last month

The law, as it stands, does not make explicit who would to be blame, but the accused in such a case would have to be the person controlling the virtual visitor, Purdy says - the person who is embodied as a robot or avatar - as the law can only prosecute humans.

He argues that using a robot maliciously would be similar in law to using a gun - responsibility lies with the controller. "While it is the gun that fires the bullet, it is the person in control of the gun that commits the act - not the gun itself."

The use of lifelike avatars would also open up the possibility of a range of new forms of deception.

In the same way that some paedophiles masquerade as adolescents in internet chatrooms you could also have impostor avatars.

Some users of internet dating sites lie about their age or other personal details. So how could you be certain that an avatar accurately represents a real person, on a dating site, say, or at a business meeting via teleconference?

"When we visually see real-life humans we can make presumptions and choices that might not be available through beamed augmented reality interactions," Purdy says.

A related issue is identity theft. You can copyright a person's creative output, but in future you might need to copyright the actual person.

Recently hip-hop fans in California were stunned when the late Tupac Shakur was reincarnated using a projector, a mirror and a mylar screen, and this reincarnation performed alongside rappers Dr Dre and Snoop Dogg. At least the virtual Tupac, who some likened to a ghost of the rapper gunned down in Las Vegas in 1996, did have the bereaved mother's blessing.

The Kinect technology, capturing an individual's gestures, is potentially a powerful tool in the hands of an identity thief, argues Prof Jeremy Bailenson, founder of the Virtual Human Interaction Lab at Stanford University, California.

"A hacker can steal my very essence, really capture all of my nuances, then build a competing avatar, a copy of me," he told the BBC. "The courts haven't even begun to think about that."

Non-verbal behaviour, like the way you walk, is more revealing about you than what you decide to put on Facebook, he said. It is like the difference between biometric data and a standard photo.

Image caption Everyone would prefer to have a good-looking avatar

However, the rich "digital footprint" that people leave on the internet can also help to identify cyber criminals.

A cyber bully hiding behind an avatar often leaves more evidence than someone bullying face-to-face, says Bailenson, author of Infinite Reality.

People may wish to have different avatars for different purposes. A businessperson, for example, may wish to appear differently to clients in various parts of the world. And given a free choice, most people will pick an avatar that looks better than they do in reality.

This is very obvious from Second Life, but Rod Humble, chief executive of Second Life's creator Linden Lab, says it is just like early classical art that focused on idealised forms - realism came along much later.

Like some others, he has noted a trend for avatars to more closely resemble their owners.



As beaming develops, one of the biggest questions for philosophers may be defining where a person actually is - just as it is key for lawyers to determine in which jurisdiction an avatar's crime is committed.


Avatars challenge the human bond between identity and a physical body.

"My body may be here in London but my life may be in a virtual apartment in New York," says Haggard. "So where am I really?"

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