Me, Myself and AI: What we learnt through our digital cloning experiments, and why it’s now more relevant than ever.

In August 2019 the innovation team at Happy Finish hit upon an idea to explore the current reality of how we could leverage cutting edge and rapidly evolving machine learning techniques to accurately clone a human.

HF has been working in the fields of immersive technologies such as AR and VR for the past 7 years and for nearly 10 years prior to that leveraging CGI to recreate real-world things like products, environments, humans and pretty much anything else you could imagine. But as over the past 3 years, we’ve started to employ AI and specifically machine learning techniques to help us create, we found the concept of recreating one of our team members virtually with its help an interesting proposition .

We entered the idea to be considered as a panel discussion at SXSW 2020, it was voted for successfully and we started our journey to create a digital twin of Ale, one of our Creative technologists. You can see our submission video for the SXSW panel here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bOBEgwhPKcY

Ale kindly (and bravely) gave us downloads of her social media and mobile phone data, plus she created regular video diary entries to help us train our models to become increasingly better at emulating Ale as a virtual replica.

Over the following months, training, testing and iterating using numerous techniques such as “generative adversarial networks”, “transformers”, “text-to-speech”, we made progress, with some surprising moral questions being raised.  Unfortunately due to C-19 SXSW 2020 did not go ahead and we reluctantly stopped working on our Ale 2.0.

Only a few months later, and with the world feeling like a different place, almost a less physical place, the opportunities virtualisation, digital twinning and immersive technologies offer brands to create, sell and promote products are more relevant than ever.

Marco and Daniel from Happy Finish will show some of the results of the exploration, discuss what they would do differently considering the rapid progress of new technical approaches in the machine learning field, explain the unexpected emotional impact they and the team felt during the experiment and explain how they are applying it all recreating the real world to solve their brand client’s marketing and content problems.

Access your complimentary pass to join UKAEG at Createch@CogX by using the code CREATECHTOPIC.