Anyone who looks at me through augmented reality glasses will see me clean-shaven, in a pressed shirt, maybe even a little younger. For my wife, I keep the default profile, because she already knows what I look like. For the students, the bearded version, since it supposedly adds authority.<\/p>
It sounds absurd. And yet the way the technology is evolving isn\u2019t that far from this vision. Since 2015, Meta Reality Labs has been developing a line of research on so\u2011called Codec Avatars\u2014photorealistic face-and-head avatars whose appearance and expressions can be reproduced digitally in real time. In the Pixel Codec Avatars paper, they demonstrated a system capable of highly faithful facial reproduction, and subsequent work advanced both the image realism and practical methods for acquiring the data needed to build an avatar.<\/p>
Newer versions based on Gaussian representations capture fine details even better, such as hair, skin microtexture and the way the face responds to changes in lighting. That still doesn\u2019t mean anyone can turn a regular selfie into a perfect face model in one go and start using it right away in everyday communication. But it means lab demos are getting close to a level that, until recently, felt like distant science fiction, like in Black Oceans.<\/em><\/p> What about the voice? Progress is just as fast. Modern models can synthesize speech from a sample just three seconds long. They preserve not only the speaker’s vocal characteristics but also the emotional and acoustic elements present in the reference recording. So if the sample sounds like an angry utterance, in a large room, with a slight reverberation, the system can reproduce those qualities too. Picking up a call from an unknown number? Better hold off on saying “hello”\u2026<\/p> Some technologies (e.g., VALLE-2) have reached human-level performance in selected benchmarks, meaning that in certain listening tests their results are comparable to ordinary human speech. That\u2019s a big deal. It doesn\u2019t mean, however, that\u2014at least for now\u2014every synthetic utterance is indistinguishable from a human one in every setting. Microsoft itself treated the project as research and didn\u2019t release it publicly, explicitly citing the risk of misuse, such as impersonating other people.<\/p> If you combine a photorealistic facial avatar with voice cloning and maturing AR and mixed reality devices, you get a very clear trajectory. We\u2019re not talking about a finished product that will change everyone\u2019s life tomorrow. The point is that the individual pieces of the puzzle already exist. A face can be digitally reconstructed and animated. A voice can be faithfully synthesized. An interface overlaid on the user\u2019s field of view isn\u2019t pure fantasy anymore. In such a world, a professor could show up to a lecture looking like a more polished version of themselves, a salesperson could sound like someone familiar, and the person you\u2019re talking to could appear not as they are but as they want to be seen\u2014not to mention foreigners who could, in their own voice, speak to us in our language right away.<\/p> And here’s a second, maybe even more interesting angle. AR glasses aren’t just a tool for changing what others see in me. They’re also a filter on what I see. Research into diminished reality<\/em>\u2014techniques for visually hiding or removing elements of a real scene\u2014shows that objects from the physical world can be digitally “erased”, and the resulting gaps filled in with a believable background. The InpaintFusion system extends that logic to three-dimensional scenes and does it incrementally, in real time, without having to reconstruct everything from scratch each time. It’s like Photoshop for 3D scenes, only running live.<\/p> So, if I don\u2019t want to see ads on the street, they disappear. That ugly apartment block outside my window is replaced by a park. Someone on the bench next to me who ruins my aesthetic mood gets visually faded out. That\u2019s where the fun ends and the question of ethics begins. Not because the technology is bad by definition, but because it gives power over the very fabric of everyday experience. Not just what I read anymore, but what I see and hear in the first place. Rolling this technology out at scale is every censor\u2019s wet dream.<\/p> Sherry Turkle has written about communication technologies that promise closeness yet often deepen loneliness. In that sense, augmented reality could go even further. It doesn’t just filter the message, but also perception. So it doesn’t just give us another information bubble, but it can start to build a sensory bubble\u2014a separate, private version of the world, more smoothly edited, more convenient, and less and less shared. It will be hard to resist.<\/p> For years, Jeremy Bailenson has shown that immersive environments can powerfully influence human behavior, emotions and beliefs. The more persuasive the medium becomes, the less it\u2019s a neutral channel and the more it\u2019s an environment that actively shapes experience. So if each of us starts operating in a slightly different personalized version of reality, the question of shared experience stops being a philosophical flourish and becomes a political, social and very practical question. What does it mean to meet face to face, if the face is algorithmically generated and the voice was trained on three seconds of audio?<\/p> I don’t know. But I’ll admit the “neat professor” profile still sounds appealing to me.<\/p> <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Imagine a Monday morning a few years from now. I get up, I don’t shave (as usual), but before I head out, I open an app and set my public profile to the “neat professor” variant.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":247,"featured_media":19183,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"rank_math_lock_modified_date":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[799,796],"tags":[],"popular":[],"difficulty-level":[38],"ppma_author":[614],"class_list":["post-19580","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-ai-lifestyle-2","category-hai-premium-2","difficulty-level-medium"],"acf":[],"authors":[{"term_id":614,"user_id":247,"is_guest":0,"slug":"prof-dr-hab-dariusz-jemielniak","display_name":"prof. dr hab. Dariusz Jemielniak","avatar_url":{"url":"https:\/\/haimagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/03\/maxresdefault-1-e1742292469999.jpg","url2x":"https:\/\/haimagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/03\/maxresdefault-1-e1742292469999.jpg"},"first_name":"Dariusz","last_name":"Jemielniak","user_url":"","job_title":"","description":"Profesor zarz\u0105dzania Akademii Leona Ko\u017ami\u0144skiego, gdzie kieruje katedr\u0105 MINDS (Management in Networked and Digital Societies). Pracuje te\u017c jako faculty associate w Berkman-Klein Center for Internet and Society na Harvardzie. Wiceprezes Polskiej Akademii Nauk. Cz\u0142onek Rady Programowej CampusAI."}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/haimagazine.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19580","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/haimagazine.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/haimagazine.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/haimagazine.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/247"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/haimagazine.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19580"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/haimagazine.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19580\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19581,"href":"https:\/\/haimagazine.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19580\/revisions\/19581"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/haimagazine.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/19183"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/haimagazine.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19580"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/haimagazine.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19580"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/haimagazine.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19580"},{"taxonomy":"popular","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/haimagazine.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/popular?post=19580"},{"taxonomy":"difficulty-level","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/haimagazine.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/difficulty-level?post=19580"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/haimagazine.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/ppma_author?post=19580"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}