http://www.makehuman.org/

create a model based on photos of yourself:

http://www.facegen.com

Great stuff, Erwin! I’m going to have to play with this, and see if I can make a “virtual me”. That is, if I can somehow come up with the $300USD required to buy the full version.

I like to add some more info on Blender here:

One very special option in Blender is it’s game-engine. It uses a real-time physics engine. I think this is a great option to create a user-interface for a chatbot or even strong-AI. I can see how the ‘virtual sensors’ in my model later on are going to be hooked up to such a model. Think of it as ‘virtual robotics’. This will be much cheaper then to build a real robot, and virtual animated characters already move much better then hardware-bots.

Then think of the possibilities when combining AI and a game engine together with augmented reality.

http://www.blender.org/features-gallery/features/ (scroll down for info on the game-engine)

video: http://www.blender.org/features-gallery/feature-videos/?video=game_engine_one

yeah, great, I just told you about our 126 synonyms, and you are simply introduce another one: ‘virtual robots’, i.e. a robot without a physical body, and still having all its sensors.

tx for the links!

oops, we already had ‘virtual robot’ in our list, but not the ‘computerized avatar’ which I found through the google search on virtual robot .

I don’t market myself as an avatar building company but over the past 4-5 years I have produced quite a few of them.
My working process makes use of the following software:
facegen : to produce a starting point model from reference images.
3ds Max : to model, rig and animate the avatar.
Mudbox: to add finer detail if needed.
Photoshop: to produce the textures.
Combustion: to post produce the avatar
flash: to deliver the avatar as an interactive element.

Thanks Adrian! Good to have animation experts on board!