Meki
02-24-2005, 10:09 AM
I'm not sure this is the right section to be posting this but one of the mods or admin can move it to where ever they think it should be... Thanks in advance... :smile:
I'm not sure why anyone would pay for something like this.... :confused:
Dialing up a girlfriend, virtually
By Keith Bradsher The New York Times
Friday, February 25, 2005
HONG KONG For men who are tired of spending the time, trouble and expense of having a real girlfriend - or who are irritated by the difficulty of finding a new one - Hong Kong now has a technological solution for lonely hearts.
Meet Vivienne, a virtual girlfriend created by Eberhard Schöneburg, chief executive of the Hong Kong software maker Artificial Life.
Vivienne likes to be taken to movies and bars. She loves to be given virtual flowers and chocolates, and she can translate six languages if you travel overseas. She never undresses, although she has some skimpy outfits for the gym, and is a tease who draws the line at anything beyond blowing kisses.
If you marry her in a virtual ceremony, you even end up with a virtual mother-in-law who really does call you in the middle of the night on your cellphone to ask where you are and whether you have been treating her daughter right.
She may sound like a mixed blessing, decidedly high maintenance and perhaps the last resort of losers. But she is nonetheless a concept that cellphone system operators and handset manufacturers are starting to embrace.
Vivienne, the product of computerized voice synthesis, streaming video and text messages, is meant not only to bring business to Artificial Life - she will be available for a monthly fee of $6, not including the airtime costs paid to cellphone operators or the price of virtual chocolates and flowers. But she is also meant to be a lure for the new, higher-tech, third generation - or 3G - cellphones.
Vivienne, who may soon be joined by a virtual boyfriend for women and, after that, a virtual boyfriend for gay men and a virtual girlfriend for lesbians, is at the leading edge of a wave of services that companies are developing to take advantage of the much faster data transmission rates made possible by 3G technology. These include the ability to download everything from high-resolution television news broadcasts to music videos to trailers of the latest movie releases.
Cellphone games are already available in South Korea and Japan that allow users to change the clothing, hairstyle and other features of doll-like images of people. Vivienne - and similar games that are likely to follow from other companies - is distinctive in that she is a figurine who appears to be three-dimensional and moves through 18 different settings, like a restaurant, shopping mall and airport.
She can converse on 35,000 topics, from philosophy to movies to sculpture. Artificial Life tweaked and reused close to 70,000 questions and answers on banking alone for Vivienne, questions developed for an unrelated contract for a Swiss private bank.
The Full Story (http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/02/24/business/girlfriend.html)
I'm not sure why anyone would pay for something like this.... :confused:
Dialing up a girlfriend, virtually
By Keith Bradsher The New York Times
Friday, February 25, 2005
HONG KONG For men who are tired of spending the time, trouble and expense of having a real girlfriend - or who are irritated by the difficulty of finding a new one - Hong Kong now has a technological solution for lonely hearts.
Meet Vivienne, a virtual girlfriend created by Eberhard Schöneburg, chief executive of the Hong Kong software maker Artificial Life.
Vivienne likes to be taken to movies and bars. She loves to be given virtual flowers and chocolates, and she can translate six languages if you travel overseas. She never undresses, although she has some skimpy outfits for the gym, and is a tease who draws the line at anything beyond blowing kisses.
If you marry her in a virtual ceremony, you even end up with a virtual mother-in-law who really does call you in the middle of the night on your cellphone to ask where you are and whether you have been treating her daughter right.
She may sound like a mixed blessing, decidedly high maintenance and perhaps the last resort of losers. But she is nonetheless a concept that cellphone system operators and handset manufacturers are starting to embrace.
Vivienne, the product of computerized voice synthesis, streaming video and text messages, is meant not only to bring business to Artificial Life - she will be available for a monthly fee of $6, not including the airtime costs paid to cellphone operators or the price of virtual chocolates and flowers. But she is also meant to be a lure for the new, higher-tech, third generation - or 3G - cellphones.
Vivienne, who may soon be joined by a virtual boyfriend for women and, after that, a virtual boyfriend for gay men and a virtual girlfriend for lesbians, is at the leading edge of a wave of services that companies are developing to take advantage of the much faster data transmission rates made possible by 3G technology. These include the ability to download everything from high-resolution television news broadcasts to music videos to trailers of the latest movie releases.
Cellphone games are already available in South Korea and Japan that allow users to change the clothing, hairstyle and other features of doll-like images of people. Vivienne - and similar games that are likely to follow from other companies - is distinctive in that she is a figurine who appears to be three-dimensional and moves through 18 different settings, like a restaurant, shopping mall and airport.
She can converse on 35,000 topics, from philosophy to movies to sculpture. Artificial Life tweaked and reused close to 70,000 questions and answers on banking alone for Vivienne, questions developed for an unrelated contract for a Swiss private bank.
The Full Story (http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/02/24/business/girlfriend.html)