Video: Meet Emily

Another small step towards a virtual reality indistinguishable from this one. At first I thought they had invented her from scratch (which would have been really impressive), but it looks like they filmed an actress reciting the monologue and then painstakingly recreated the shot, frame by frame, with an animated doppelganger. You can still tell it’s fake, but to roughly the same extent that the robots in “Westworld” were fake: A slight telltale imperfection here and there, but otherwise, money. I remember reading a story as a kid about a supercomputer that could be programmed to scan archival film footage of Babe Ruth, Muhammad Ali, etc., and then resurrect them as animations that would look precisely as lifelike as actual film. ETA of that technological verisimilitude, per the Times’s story: 2020.