Private Places

Christo and Jean Claud Wrapped Reichstag, 1995.

How 3D technology is capturing the world
Oct 2019, BBC News

Photogrammetry - making 3-D models out of laser-photographs by simultaneously capturing visual and spatial information. Think of LIDAR, the sonar-like laser beams shooting from the Google maps car in all directions to create a 3-D model.

They're getting good at this, to the point that physical inspections are being done on the models and not the real thing. Which makes sense, what if you want to inspect a bridge for cracks, but it's spanning the Hudson River. You can now make a model of it, and inspect the model instead, and at any scale.

Imagine recreating via 3D printer a scaled version of something that needs to be inspected. Enemy territory, home interior, or just a bit of infrastructure that needs to be inspected for safety. Anything you want to look at, investigate, explore, or immerse yourself in, can be scanned and recreated either in 3D or in virtual reality.

Even other people's bodies? Are we going on tours of people's digestive systems? Somebody brings "back to life" Elvis's colon, models it in 3-D, and prints it out so we can walk through it like a museum?

Post Script
Living skin can now be 3-D-printed with blood vessels included
Nov 2019, phys.org

Bio-inks
In this paper, the researchers show that if they add key elements—including human endothelial cells, which line the inside of blood vessels, and human pericyte cells, which wrap around the endothelial cells—with animal collagen and other structural cells typically found in a skin graft, the cells start communicating and forming a biologically relevant vascular structure within the span of a few weeks.

They're taking two kinds of blood vessel cells, adding them to animal collagen, and printing them onto a substrate.

Within weeks, the cells start working with each other, and spontaneously generating blood vessels.

***
If you thought deepfake pornography was twisted...

Image source: Christo and Jean Claud Wrapped Reichstag 1995, photo by txmx 2

All Aboard

Sure is a lot of talk about the coming juggernaut that is the 5G network. I'm not so sure that we'll be swimming in holometric datagrams within the next couple years, but I am trying hard to imagine what it will be like. What am I doing today, as a totally routine task, that would have been impossible while I still had a 1x phone in my pocket? Real time traffic? Meh, 1010 Wins.

Those artificial humans though?

She is attractive, emotive, and all-too-real. But Lia is an emotionally intelligent "artificial human"  with expressions and slight skin imperfections that make it difficult to tell that she is digital.

Lia has a virtual brain, virtual nervous system and even digital versions of dopamine and oxytocin that affect her neurons and autonomously trigger facial muscles. She can make eye contact with you—you'll see your own reflection looking at her—and read your face, detecting your emotional state. If you smile, Lia will smile back.
-Soul Machines

image source: Wall Street Journal link

Notes:
5G can make digital humans look real and turn real people into holograms
Mar 2019, phys.org

People think and behave differently in virtual reality than they do in real life
Jan 2019, phys.org

Partially Related Post Script:
An approach for motion planning on asteroid surfaces with irregular gravity fields
Feb 2019, phys.org

^I'm no extraterrestrial scientist but this is the kind of thing that makes even hard science fiction sound soft

Totally Unrelated Post Script:
Just keeping track; more face things:
AI fake face website launched
Feb 2019, BBC