Gadget Geeks Given a Glimpse of Sharp

Monday 7 March saw the broadcast of the heavily trailed Gadget Show which featured Suzi Perry and Jason Bradbury presenting the programme whilst not being there. Yes, for one night only, Suzi and Jason were substituted with their virtual selves; Jason took the form of a hauntingly realistic latex android and Suzi “became” a motion-captured projection, her voice and movements being digitised whilst her virtual self was “in” the Birmingham studio. (We’ll know the digital revolution has happened when those scare quotes disappear – and they won’t have been deleted by a human.)

Suzi Perry @ The Sharp Project – February 2011 from The Boot Room on Vimeo.

The verdict? The show demonstrated both the incredible capabilities of technology but also the limitations thereof. I must point out that budget and time were factors; but that’s the whole point of Gadget Show challenges. Chucking money at something isn’t a challenge and I’m willing to prove it to anyone who wants to use me in a challenge.

Amazingly, Jason really did (if we are to believe him) have no involvement whatsoever after having himself cloned; the droid was programmed to respond in English to vocalised stimulus it picked up, and even used stereophonic ear-implanted microphones to detect the position of those talking to him and turn to “look” at them with his dreamboat glass eyes. Visually, it was stunning. If you flicked on to Channel 5 halfway through the show, you’d probably think Jason was in the studio, albeit in the faraway state of someone who had just had some terrifying news delivered through his earpiece. His android retorts were often hilariously odd; after Polly introduced an underwater upright mono-Polly navigator, he turned and informed her that “Justin Bieber lives in a green submarine.” Deadpan bean-spilling is clearly within the grasp of entry-level AI, and that’s frightening. But as far as “being” the chirpy, witty, lovable Jason was concerned, he was, well, closer to C-2PO.

On to Suzi, and the Sharp connection. She decided to go mo-cap, transmitting her barest digital elements to the studio to be reconstructed on screen, a bit like Natasha Henstridge in Species except nothing like it really; I just like mentioning it. Suzi’s close encounter with a shipping container came when she came to chat to MoCapOne about the possibilities. She was informed by Warren that if she had the budget of Avatar (she was a few grand under) and a few months to spare (this was looking bad), they’d see what they could do.* (It must also be pointed out that MoCap’s owner Hogan was, by calendric injustice, in Singapore on business, further baddening the lookingness.) So in the circumstances, Suzi decided to attempt a different solution, sadly not with MoCapOne but with one of their brothers-in-bobblesuits in a made-up city called “London”. But being Suzi, she didn’t leave The Sharp Project without having a little play in the resident capt-suit and dazzling the assembled in-house digital enterpreneurs with her easy, professional manner and lightspeed command of all things techy.

On the night, the viewers, never got to see Suzi in the flesh; all we found out was that she was in “London” having her motions captured, and since the studio is in Birmingham and she was interacting with the other presenter(s), there must have been some two-way linkage going on. It says a lot about the our expectations these days that she actually looked computer generated, not unlike a character in a web-based role-playing reality game. Her movements were exaggerated and her facial movement was limited to some automatic lip-synching, but when you take a step back and appreciate the sheer amount of data that was flowing up and down the country and the necessarily instantaneous rendering that must have been taking place (or might not have taken place), it’s a pretty stunning display, especially considering that in London they still attach rubber suckers to their phones to access the internet.

I imagine if Jeremy Kyle saw the broadcast he’ll have heaved a sigh of relief and drawn the dust sheet back over his escape capsule before informing the foreign secretary that his flight to Venezuela has been put on hold. But it’s experiments like the Gadget Show‘s that give us the data and the experience to invent things that improve our lives, like those resin meerkats you put in your garden. And given the time and the budget available for the show, Jason and Suzi’s alter-egos proved to be an admirable pair of prototypes.

* Important note: MoCapOne’s service charges are not measured in multiples of the Avatar budget. It was a negotiable opening gambit.

Writer: Charlie Hankers