David Lynch to appear at Cannes Film Festival in avatar form
Revered director David Lynch will be appearing at next month’s Cannes Film Festival, and not just in person. Lynch has been working with Co Kerry-based start-up Xavatar to develop his own customisable avatar. The doppelgänger is set to make an appearance at the event.
The company’s real-time animation capability will be demonstrated through avatars of Lynch and other well-known celebrities, who will be beamed in as ‘Xavatars’ in the start-up’s specially designed metaverse. The live event will be overseen by Planet X Studios.
This new technology will allow the Mulholland Drive, Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks director to appear at a panel discussion about the use of music in movies. Lynch will be joined by music icon Donovan and rapper-actor Redman. Xavatar uses artificial intelligence-powered facial and audio recognition to follow users’ movements in real time, articulating its targets’ mannerisms and gestures in animated form.
Speaking to the Business Post, company boss Jason P Rothburg clarified that users won’t require VR headsets to engage in Xavatar’s metaverse: “People are reluctant to wear big clunky headsets to enter the metaverse and that’s where Meta is getting things badly wrong,” he said.
“It is forcing people to do have them paying out for their headsets. It just shows that for them the metaverse is primarily about monetisation rather than entertainment. It is hard to believe that Meta has invested so many billions in something that to date sucks so badly.”
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