What If Your Friends Like Your Digital Avatar More Than The Real You?

Roger Highfield, editor of New Scientist :

Central to our identity is how we judge our own looks and how other people perceive us.

Jose Bentham, a 39-year-old banker, and Susan Golton, a 22-year-old design student...were scanned by a computer artist and their typical vital statistics "printed out" by a 3D digital printer, so their naked paper sculptures could be displayed in all their life-size glory in the new exhibit.

As part of its exploration of identity, the gallery will also give visitors the chance to play around with their own, by using computers to morph their faces and voice-boxes so they look and sound different. It is all good fun, and guaranteed to draw in the crowds. But what intrigues me is the tantalising possibility that our identity – who we are – could eventually become completely divorced from our physical appearance.

There is now a torrent of personal information about almost every one of us swirling around on the internet, from digital snaps to tweets to Facebook profiles. This has led to discussions about how you can ''capture'' an individual's personality by uploading personal material and memories and blending all this with information to create an "avatar" – an electronic simulation that is as close to your true personality as possible.

Lifenaut, an American company, offers the chance to make ''a rich back-up" of your life by storing photographs, voice recordings and information submitted by you.

...such initiatives are only the beginning. And what fascinates me in particular is the idea that an avatar stitched together from crumbs of personal information harvested from across the web might behave, or evolve, in a different way to one that you created as a straight copy of yourself – in other words, it could be a truer version of you than you are able, or willing, to reveal.

The rise of such digital alter egos could warp our ideas about identity, and ultimately even challenge our thinking about what it means to be human. That's something to think about the next time you log on.

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