Cyber stand-ins to read e-mail

By ADAM GIFFORD

"Virtual people" are about to invade the internet, thanks to software partly developed by Auckland University's engineering department.

The university is on the verge of signing a multimillion-dollar contract with Boston company LifeFX, which last week made its Facemail player available for free download on the internet from www.lifefx.com.

The player means that, instead of reading e-mail as text, users can have their messages read to them on screen by a stand-in digital person.

An e-mail sender can choose how he or she wants the stand-in to look, by selecting from a repertoire of smiles, winks, frowns and other facial expressions.

LifeFX chief executive Lucie Salhany said it was giving away the e-mail technology to build an installed base for the stand-in technology, which the company would licence to vendors of customer relationship management (CRM) software to use in online support.

LifeFX believes its stand-ins will be used for teaching, entertaining, messaging and chat-rooms.

Auckland University engineering science professor Peter Hunter said the Facemail software came from work his department did in association with the medical school on modelling organs and other body parts for use in research.

"LifeFX saw the potential of using it for communications and internet-based applications," he said.

"We developed the software down here to do face modelling, and LifeFX added the speech component and turned it into an internet tool."

The link came through former student Dr Mark Sagar, who went to work for LifeFX after moving to Boston to do postdoctoral work at Massachusetts Institute of Technology under Professor Hunter's brother, Ian Hunter, a professor of mechanical engineering.

LifeFX has an exclusive, worldwide, perpetual licence to use the software for communications and entertainment applications.

It has paid for Auckland University scientist Shane Blackett to work on the software fulltime and Dr Richard Christie and Dr David Bullivant to work on it part-time.

Professor Hunter, who oversees the work with Dr Poul Nielsen, said medical imaging was still the department's core work. It had a relationship with a Princeton, New Jersey company, Physiome Sciences, to commercialise that software.

"Physiome pays for more of our people working at a postgraduate level," he said.

The department has also used overseas income to build its technology infrastructure, including the $1 million, 32-processor SGI Origin 2000 high-performance computer used to develop the software.

Professor Hunter said the university had pioneered the development of mathematical modelling for representing anatomy and physiology for 20 years.

The work being done with Physiome had implications for drug research. "If you can create a model representing cell or organ function and you want to look at how a drug interacts with that organ, being able to model the effect can be extremely useful.

"Drug companies spend up to $500 million and 10 years finding new drugs, so they're keen to cut down the process. Modelling is in its early days, but it's having a huge impact."

Professor Hunter said the university wanted to set up a New Zealand operation so more of the profits from the technology could be held locally.

"The company will still have to have international links and have to work with partners in the market."