# Specification — Full-Body Historical Virtual Human
One character asset, three delivery surfaces: **kiosk**, **mobile AR**, **VR**. Knowledge bound to the figure’s writings, contemporary accounts, and the intellectual world available in their lifetime. Not an open-web chatbot wearing a costume.
This note is a production spec, not a vendor pitch. Methods that already shipped are cited back to [[Case Study — Jumbo Mana Bonjour Vincent]] and [[Case Study — Dimensions in Testimony and StoryFile]].
---
## 1. Product definition
A **full-body, real-time 3D historical figure** that can:
- Stand or sit at human scale in a gallery kiosk (or LED / projection)
- Appear in a visitor’s space through a phone or tablet (AR)
- Be visited in a reconstructed period environment (VR headset)
- Speak from a constrained knowledge base
- Perform authored events (monologue, reenactment, debate) and unscripted Q&A inside guardrails
The same **identity package** (mesh, wardrobe, voice, knowledge graph, conversation policy) is compiled to three runtimes. Do not build three characters.
### What it is not
- Not Dimensions in Testimony (that requires a living sitter and unedited video).
- Not a HeyGen talking-head.
- Not “ChatGPT with a Lincoln skin” on the open web.
- Not a claim that the dead person has returned.
Label on every surface: *An interpretation built from sources dated to [year]. It can be wrong. It cannot know what happened after [cutoff].*
---
## 2. Delivery architecture (one asset, three clients)
```
Sources + scholar
│
▼
Identity package
(look / move / speak / know / refuse)
│
├─► Kiosk runtime (UE Pixel Streaming or local GPU)
├─► Mobile AR runtime (ARKit / ARCore, or WebXR)
└─► VR runtime (Quest / PCVR, same UE project, different LOD + locomotion)
```
### 2.1 Kiosk
Best fidelity and the only place you should premiere the character.
- 55–86" portrait or landscape display, or a life-size LED blade
- Optional depth camera / mic array for approach detection and barge-in
- Local workstation (RTX 4070-class minimum; 4080/4090 if hair + Lumen + two characters) **or** Pixel Streaming from a GPU cloud box
- Always-on “rest pose + ambient life” so the figure is present before anyone speaks
- Captions on screen (ADA). Leeds Castle’s Eleanor model: environment-aware, multilingual, conversation as the *end* of a curatorial path, not the start.
Kiosk is also the capture booth for live events: a scholar or actor can drive the face via Live Link Face while the public sees the historical body.
### 2.2 Mobile AR
Purpose: take the figure out of the building and onto a school lawn, a battlefield overlook, or a kitchen table.
Two honest tiers:
| Tier | Method | Look | Cost to run |
|---|---|---|---|
| A. Billboard AR | 2D or carded 3D in ARKit/ARCore; baked or lightly rigged | Good enough for “Lincoln on the lawn” | Cheap, WebAR possible |
| B. Anchored full-body | USDZ / glTF or streamed UE pixel into AR | Closer to kiosk, fragile outdoors | Higher device heat, hosting |
Do not promise MetaHuman cinema quality on a mid-range Android in sunlight. Ship Tier A for public AR; reserve Tier B for a staff iPad tour or a Quest passthrough experience.
World-locking ideas that actually help: GPS + image target on a plaque; “stand on this mark”; AR Lincoln delivering Gettysburg at the ALPLM-style exhibit point.
### 2.3 VR
Purpose: *place*, not just *person*. The character needs a room that teaches (Einstein’s Zurich lodgings, a printing shop, a quarterdeck).
- Quest 3 / 3S class for volume; PCVR or Cloud XR for hero close-ups
- Teleport locomotion + seated mode; the figure should not require the visitor to stand in a 4m room
- Scale 1:1. Hand presence for pointing at objects the character can pick up
- Optional second occupant (teacher + student, or two historical figures)
MetaHuman 5.6–5.8 is the default body pipeline: Creator in-engine, body + face, Live Link from webcam/phone/audio, mobile LOD path that Epic has demoed with hundreds of characters on phone (crowds, not hero close-ups). Use **UE Optimized** assembly for AR/Quest and **UE Cine** for the kiosk hero.
---
## 3. Production pipeline
Eight stages. Later stages must be allowed to send the character back to stage 2.
### Stage 0 — Figure selection gate
Score candidates on six axes before anyone opens MetaHuman Creator:
1. **Source density** — letters, speeches, published works, recorded voice if any
2. **Likeness evidence** — portraits, death mask, photos, measurements, clothing
3. **Public appetite** — search, curriculum, tourism, existing Chautauqua demand
4. **Legal clearance** — death date, domicile, estates, photograph copyrights
5. **Moral heat** — enslaved people, victims, living descendants, sacred status
6. **Period knowledge bound** — can you draw a clean cutoff year?
Green only if 1, 2, and 4 are strong. Popularity without sources produces a costume.
### Stage 1 — Documentary spine (6–16 weeks, overlapping art)
Build three corpora, physically separate in the repo:
| Corpus | Contents | Use |
|---|---|---|
| **A. Own words** | Letters, diaries, published works, recorded speeches. Prefer scholarly editions (Founders Online, Van Gogh letters, Darwin correspondence). | RAG primary. Quoted verbatim when the user asks “what did you write about X.” |
| **B. Contemporary accounts** | Newspapers, enemies, family, court records, portraits’ captions. Labeled as *other people said*. | The figure may contest these. Never silently merge them into “I.” |
| **C. Period knowledge** | What an educated person of that place/year could know: books in their library, maps, science, scripture, law. Cutoff date enforced. | Stops Jefferson from discussing CRISPR and lets Franklin discuss Leyden jars. |
Add a fourth file that is **not** in the model: **D. Modern scholar notes** (anachronisms to avoid, contested facts, trigger topics, “we do not know”). This drives the refusal policy, not the voice.
Van der Veen’s rule from Vincent still applies: feed verified material so the system is not “spitting back Wikipedia.”
Output of stage 1: a sourced chronology, a voice dossier (diction, metaphors, jokes, temper), a list of things the figure *would not know*, and a question bank of 400–800 anticipated visitor questions with cited answers.
### Stage 2 — Likeness and body
Reference order of authority:
1. Photographs / film (if any)
2. Life mask, death mask, skeletal metrics
3. Multiple independent portraits, not one romantic painting
4. Written descriptions of height, gait, scars, teeth, clothing
5. Period-accurate dress from costume historians (St Andrews: 12 garment sets for 24 bodies)
Build path:
1. Sculpt or Mesh-to-MetaHuman from the best 3D or photogrammetry of a reconstruction
2. MetaHuman Creator for topology, skin, teeth, body shape
3. Groom (hair/beard) as a separate art pass — this is where cheap builds die
4. Wardrobe in Marvelous Designer / CLO, then MetaHuman Outfit assets so clothes refit
5. Props: spectacles, pipe, rifle, palette, cane — each is a conversation affordance in VR
6. Two LODs minimum: Hero (kiosk/VR near) and Tour (AR/Quest/far)
If no reliable face exists (Genesee’s Backus problem), say so on the label and design a *type* with documented clothing and age, or pick another figure.
Do not use a living actor’s identifiable face without a contract. Dalí Lives did this with consent and an ad agency; a historical product should not silently deepfake a lookalike.
### Stage 3 — Voice
Priority stack:
1. Restored historical recording + limited clone **only** if estate and ethics clear (rare before the 1890s)
2. Directed actor + dialect coach (Leeds Castle hired a native Spanish actor for Eleanor; ETH used a comedian for young Einstein after writing the lines)
3. Period-informed TTS with an actor’s supervised fine-tune, then lock the voice so it cannot drift
Record a **voice bible**: 30–60 minutes covering calm exposition, anger, humor, prayer, public oratory. That becomes both TTS training and the animation driver’s audio set.
Always ship captions. Always ship a “this is an actor / a model” line in the credits.
### Stage 4 — Motion
Three layers, mixed at runtime:
| Layer | Source | When |
|---|---|---|
| **Authored performance** | Actor in mocap or Live Link Face + body, directed like a short film | Chautauqua monologue, set-piece reenactment |
| **Procedural life** | Idle, weight shift, look-at visitor, breathe, blink | Kiosk rest state |
| **Audio-driven face** | MetaHuman Animator / Audio2Face / in-engine audio-driven | Unscripted answers |
Body in conversation: IK to a lectern or chair; gesture library tagged by rhetorical move (point, open hand, pace). Full-body mocap for the 8–20 minute monologue; do not mocap every Q&A.
For AR, bake or heavily compress the monologue as an animation sequence so the phone is not solving a live face.
### Stage 5 — Mind (conversation system)
Hybrid, because pure generation and pure retrieval each fail a historical brief.
```
Visitor utterance
│
├─ intent + safety filter
├─ if matches authored beat → play clip / animation (DiT-style retrieval)
├─ else RAG over Corpus A, then B, then C
├─ generate answer in-character with citations hidden from visitor, shown to staff
├─ cutoff + refusal policy
└─ speech + face + optional gesture tag
```
Hard rules:
- Cutoff year is a system constraint, not a prompt suggestion. George AI’s “electric fence” is the right idea; feeding “today’s conditions” back in is how you get Glenn Beck in a wig.
- When the answer is from Corpus B, the figure should be able to say “Madison wrote that about me” rather than “I think.”
- Log every question and the corpus hit. Review weekly for the first 90 days, monthly after. Orsay learned that suicide was the top Vincent question only after install.
- Staff dashboard can force a canned reply onto a new FAQ overnight without a model retrain.
Do not put an LLM in front of *survivor testimony*. That method stays in the DiT note.
### Stage 6 — Event layer (what the character *does*)
The conversation engine is only one mode. Ship a **program clock** so venues can book the figure the way they book a Chautauquan.
Classic Chautauqua three-beat (use this; audiences already understand it):
1. **In character monologue** (12–20 min), sourced, set in a dated moment
2. **In character Q&A**
3. **Out of character** — a scholar or a “Narrator” agent explains sources, disagreements, and what the figure could not have known
On a kiosk, beat 3 can be a second voice or a wall panel. In VR, beat 3 can be a doorway that leaves the period room.
Other event types are in §5.
### Stage 7 — Compile to three clients
| Target | Assembly | Networking | Input |
|---|---|---|---|
| Kiosk | UE Cine MetaHuman, Pixel Stream or local | Optional cloud GPU | Mic + camera + touch |
| AR phone | glTF/USDZ hero + baked anims, or WebXR stream | CDN + light backend for chat | Touch + mic |
| VR | UE Optimized + period scene | Optional multiplayer | Hands + voice + teleport |
One content repo. Per-platform materials, hair cards vs strands, and animation compression differ. Do not fork the knowledge base.
### Stage 8 — Evaluation before public
Test with:
- Historians who did *not* build the corpus (blind fact check of 50 answers)
- Teachers and a class
- People who hold the figure as an ancestor or faith object
- Accessibility review (captions, height of kiosk figure, seated VR, contrast)
- Red-team prompts: current elections, medical advice, “say slurs,” “predict the future,” “which religion is true”
Ship a public methodology page. Hide nothing about cutoff year and actor voice.
---
## 4. Subject matter for presentations
Think in **programs**, not “topics the chatbot knows.” Each program has a date, a place, a source list, and a learning goal.
### 4.1 Life and work
- Formative years, craft, a single decisive year (Van Gogh at Auvers; Einstein in 1905; Douglass in 1845)
- How a text was made (drafting the Declaration, composing a symphony, mapping a voyage)
- Daily material life: food, money, illness, servants, tools
### 4.2 Ideas in their own vocabulary
- A doctrine they actually defended, with the books on their desk
- What they got wrong *by their own later lights* if the corpus supports it
- Disputed points, presented as disputed (Corpus B on stage)
### 4.3 Place-based programs
- Site-specific AR: the figure at *this* house, battlefield, lab, church
- VR reconstruction of a lost room
- Walking tour: five anchors, two minutes each
### 4.4 Civic and classroom
- Primary-source seminar: visitor brings a document, figure responds only from Corpus A
- Exam prep / oral defense
- Language practice in the figure’s tongue (Eleanor: EN/FR/ES because those were *her* languages)
### 4.5 What to refuse as subject matter
- Medical or legal advice in modern terms
- Endorsement of living politicians
- Graphic replay of sexual violence or torture unless the venue is a memorial with a protocol
- “What do you think of [event after cutoff]?” as if they had an opinion. Offer beat 3 instead.
---
## 5. Interactive events the character can perform
### 5.1 Chautauqua monologue + Q&A
Still the best format ever designed for this. Scholar-performers already research primary sources, speak 45-ish minutes in first person, take questions in character, then drop character. A virtual figure should steal that clock exactly, including the drop-character beat, which is what keeps the product honest.
Length for kiosk/AR: 8–12 minutes authored + 5–10 minutes Q&A. VR can hold 20.
### 5.2 Reenactment of a dated scene
Not open world. A *scene*:
- Gettysburg Address, with the visitor as a listener in the crowd (VR) or on the lawn (AR)
- A salon argument with scripted beats and one improvisational middle
- A scientific demonstration the figure can actually perform with period tools
- A courtroom or parliamentary speech, visitor as clerk
Needs authored animation, a set, and a fail-safe if the visitor walks away.
### 5.3 Object lesson
Visitor points at a prop (or an AR-tagged museum object). The figure talks only about that object from Corpus A/B. This is the highest-trust mode after pure retrieval.
Historic Metahumans already did this with scanned Tel Dan artifacts.
### 5.4 Dual-character programs (the high-value unique event)
Two full-body figures, same engine, **separate corpora and cutoff dates**.
| Pairing | Why it works | Risk |
|---|---|---|
| Figure × contemporary of theirs | Adams–Jefferson letters; Marx–Bakunin; Hypatia–Synesius | Must not invent a meeting that never happened unless labeled *counterfactual* |
| Figure × later interpreter | Douglass × a 2026 scholar-agent | Scholar-agent must be visually and verbally distinct |
| Figure × antagonist | Lincoln × Douglas; Erasmus × Luther | Moderated; no crowd-pleasing slurs |
| Figure × “archive clerk” | Historical body + a modern librarian avatar that cites | Cleanest dual setup; clerk owns beat 3 |
Implementation: two MetaHumans, two RAG indexes, a **moderator policy** that hands the floor. On a kiosk, split screen or a turntable. In VR, two chairs. In AR, only one body at a time unless you accept a mess.
Label counterfactuals in the title: *A conversation that never occurred, built from letters of 1791–1826.*
### 5.5 Classroom seminar
Teacher locks a topic and a source pack. Students may only ask from that pack. Analytics to the teacher (Hello History / Humy already sell this layer; you want it with a body).
### 5.6 Guided tour / concierge
The figure walks a pre-baked path in VR or appears at AR stops. Low improvisation, high production design. This is how you get throughput at a busy site.
### 5.7 Private audience
One visitor, booked slot, longer Q&A, like Leeds Castle’s chapel. Highest magic, worst throughput, needs a docent in earshot.
### 5.8 What not to stage
- Séance aesthetics
- Romance / companionship mode
- The figure as customer-service agent for the gift shop
- Unlabeled debates about living people
---
## 6. Resources to produce something faithful, complete, and watchable
“Faithful” is sources. “Complete” is a body that holds up at 2 meters plus a mind that can last 15 minutes. “Compelling” is performance and scene, not polygon count.
### 6.1 Team (hero figure, first year)
| Seat | Time | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Project lead / producer | 0.5–1 FTE | Owns cutoff, label, venues |
| Historian / editor | 0.5–1 FTE | Veto on text. Not a consultant who visits twice |
| Conversation designer | 0.5 FTE | Question bank, refusals, Chautauqua clock |
| MetaHuman / character artist | 0.5–1 FTE | Face, body, groom, skin |
| Costume + look-dev | 0.25–0.5 FTE | Period dress, dyes, wear |
| Technical animator | 0.5 FTE | Face, retarget, idles |
| Mocap performer + director | 2–4 weeks | Monologues and gesture bible |
| Voice actor + coach | 1–2 weeks + pickup | Unless a cleared recording exists |
| UE / streaming engineer | 0.5–1 FTE | Kiosk + VR + LOD |
| AR engineer | 0.25–0.5 FTE | Can be the same person on a small build |
| Backend / RAG | 0.25–0.5 FTE | Corpus infra, logs, dashboard |
| QA + accessibility | 0.25 FTE | |
| Venue producer | part-time | Lighting, copy, docents |
A serious first hero is **6–12 people part-time over 6–9 months**, not a weekend LoRA.
### 6.2 Money (order-of-magnitude, 2026)
Reuse the bands already established in this vault:
| Ambition | Ballpark | What you get |
|---|---|---|
| Chat + portrait only | $2k–$15k | Not this spec |
| MetaHuman + thin RAG + one kiosk scene | $40k–$90k | Demo, not a program |
| Hero figure, Chautauqua set, kiosk + Quest | **$150k–$400k** | The honest “complete” first character |
| Hero + AR tour + second figure + dual debate | $400k–$900k | Season of programs |
| DiT-grade living witness | $250k–$1.8M | Different product; do not mix |
On-going: GPU stream $0.50–$2/hr per concurrent kiosk if clouded; actor residuals if contracted that way; historian hours for log review; venue staff.
### 6.3 Stack (opinionated default)
- Unreal Engine 5.6+ with MetaHuman Creator in-engine
- Mesh-to-MetaHuman if you have a reconstruction mesh
- Live Link Face / webcam for capture; Audio2Face or MetaHuman audio-driven for unscripted
- Pixel Streaming for kiosk; Quest build for VR; ARKit + USDZ or WebXR for phone
- RAG over versioned corpora (A/B/C) with citation store
- Separate policy model or rules engine for cutoff and refusals
- Analytics that store questions, not visitor faces, unless the venue has a sign and a DPA
### 6.4 Time
| Phase | Duration |
|---|---|
| Gate + rights memo | 2–4 weeks |
| Corpus + question bank | 6–12 weeks |
| Likeness + wardrobe | 6–10 weeks (parallel) |
| Voice + mocap | 3–6 weeks |
| Conversation + events | 6–10 weeks |
| Three-platform compile + eval | 6–8 weeks |
| Soft open + log revision | 4–8 weeks |
First public hero: **about 9 months** if rights are clean. Faster only if you steal a reconstruction mesh and a published correspondence.
### 6.5 Completeness checklist
A figure is “complete” enough to show when it has:
- [ ] Cutoff year on the splash screen
- [ ] Corpus A in a citable edition
- [ ] Hero mesh that survives a 4-second orbit in kiosk
- [ ] Period wardrobe with a source card
- [ ] Voice credits
- [ ] One 10-minute authored monologue
- [ ] 200 tested Q&As with citations
- [ ] Refusal behavior for afterlife, medicine, living politicians
- [ ] Beat 3 (out of character)
- [ ] Captions
- [ ] A public methodology page
- [ ] A takedown / correction path
---
## 7. High-content, high-demand figures
“High-content” means a thick Corpus A. “Popular” means audiences already come. Prefer intersection.
### Tier 1 — dense writings, global name, usually clearable
| Figure | Why the corpora are rich | Watch-outs |
|---|---|---|
| **Abraham Lincoln** | Speeches, letters, papers project; endless pedagogy; ALPLM already doing AR | Industry of estates and photo copyrights; sacred civic status |
| **Thomas Jefferson** | Founders Online; science + architecture + politics | Slavery, Sally Hemings — must be in Corpus B and in beat 3, not optional |
| **Benjamin Franklin** | Autobiography, letters, science demo-friendly | Easy to turn into a mascot |
| **Frederick Douglass** | Narratives + newspapers + speeches | Living-history ethics; do not soften |
| **Charles Darwin** | Correspondence project is enormous | Religion-in-the-classroom fights |
| **Galileo** | Letters, *Sidereus Nuncius*, trial records | Church politics; VR telescope is a gift |
| **Marie Curie** | Notebooks, letters, two sciences, bilingual FR/PL | Radioactivity romance vs. labor and sexism |
| **Ada Lovelace** | Notes on the Analytical Engine + letters | Thin visual record; high STEM demand |
| **Leonardo da Vinci** | Notebooks | Myth vs. document; wardrobe/fandom pressure |
| **Vincent van Gogh** | 800–900 letters; path already proven | Suicide as default question — budget the protocol |
| **Jane Austen** | Letters + novels as period knowledge | Fans will punish diction errors |
| **Mark Twain** | Mountains of prose + stage manner | Estates/trademarks on some late material; easy to over-quip |
| **Mahatma Gandhi** | Vast collected works | Family and national sensitivity; Historic Metahumans already prototyped |
| **Simón Bolívar** | Letters, decrees; Spanish-language market | National mythologies |
| **Ibn Sina (Avicenna)** | Canon + philosophy; multilingual demand | Translation quality is the product |
| **Murasaki Shikibu** | *Genji* + diary | Visual reconstruction is interpretive; say so |
| **Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz** | Poems, *Respuesta* | Excellent dual-language program |
### Tier 2 — strong demand, thinner or hotter corpus
Einstein (ETH already did young Einstein; photo/voice rights and Hebrew University history are messy), Tesla (myth factory), Cleopatra (almost no own words — fail the source-density gate unless you accept a *composite of sources about her*), Napoleon (good corpus, nationalist capture), Hypatia (almost no own words), Shakespeare (works ≠ private self; do the playwright-on-stage, not the inner life), Sacagawea (almost no own words; do not invent), living-memory figures (King, Kahlo, Orwell) — publicity and moral load jump.
### Tier 3 — locally perfect
The sleeper hits are **site-specific**: a ship captain at a maritime museum, a mill girl at a factory, Eleanor of Castile at Leeds, Biran at Tel Dan. Source density can be moderate if the *place* carries the visitor. Dual-character with a famous correspondent then exports the local figure.
### Selection rule
If Corpus A is thinner than a short monograph, do not build a full-body conversational human. Build a documentary, a reconstruction face, or a guided tour narration instead.
---
## 8. Legal, logistic, moral
### 8.1 Legal
**Writings.** In the U.S., works of authors dead more than 70 years are generally public domain (simpler for pre-1929 publications). Scholarly *editions* and translations can still be copyrighted — license the edition or use a PD text. Do not scrape a copyrighted collected-works site into RAG and call it research.
**Photographs and portraits.** A 16th-century painting may be PD; a 1955 museum photograph of that painting may not. A specific Einstein photo is still someone’s copyright even if Einstein’s persona is argued to be free in some states.
**Right of publicity / NIL.** U.S. state patchwork, no federal statute. Typical post-mortem terms: CA 70 years, NY 40 (domicile + date conditions), IN 100, TN potentially perpetual if exploited. About two dozen states recognize a post-mortem right. Many statutes target *commercial* use; news, commentary, and some biographical/documentary uses have exemptions (NY’s replica statute is explicit about historical and biographical works). Educational kiosks are safer than merch, apps with ads, or “meet Lincoln, subscribe now.” Get a memo per figure, per venue state, per monetization plan.
**Voice.** Some states now treat voice as publicity; federal likeness bills have been proposed. An actor contract must cover digital reuse across kiosk/AR/VR and future retraining.
**Trademarks.** Estates trademark names and signatures (Einstein, Edison, some presidential libraries). Search before the splash screen.
**EU / UK / elsewhere.** Personality rights and data-protection-adjacent claims differ. A figure who died recently in France is not the same case as Jefferson. If you ship AR worldwide, geofence or license.
**Indigenous, sacred, and communal knowledge.** Not a publicity-statute problem. It is a permissions problem with living communities. Do not build a prophet, a clan ancestor, or a ceremony leader from settler archives alone.
### 8.2 Logistic
- **Throughput.** A 15-minute private audience kills a gallery. Offer a 90-second “approach” mode plus booked slots.
- **Noise.** Kiosk mics in museums are hostile. Use array mics, a push-to-talk affordance, and big captions.
- **School filters.** Districts will block cloud LLMs. Offer an on-prem or allowlisted endpoint.
- **Offline day.** The kiosk must survive a dead circuit with authored monologues only.
- **Versioning.** When a historian corrects a fact, you need a corpus version number on the credits.
- **Staffing.** Someone has to reboot the box and read the question log. Budget a docent hour per open day.
- **Heat and battery.** Outdoor AR at noon will drop Tier B. Publish device requirements.
- **Internationalization.** Translating *answers* is not translating *the person*. Either keep the figure in their language with captions, or hire a historian-translator, not Google Translate on the output.
### 8.3 Moral
Non-negotiable labels: interpretation; cutoff; actor/model; sources.
**Do not flatten.** Jefferson without slavery, Gandhi without the ashraf and race writings, Curie without the cost to her body, are product failures, not politeness.
**Do not comfort-generate.** If the corpus is silent, say “I did not write about that.” Inventing a gentle opinion is how histobots become propaganda. George AI’s critics were reacting to this, not to the T-shirt.
**Trauma.** Suicide (Vincent), massacre, rape, medical racism: write protocols before install. Offer a visible exit. Do not let the figure give modern clinical advice.
**Descendants and communities.** Ask when they exist and are findable. Biran’s family permission is the model. “Public domain” is not the same as “no one can be harmed.”
**Children.** Default the figure out of companionship language. No “I love you.” No secret-keeping.
**Labor.** An actor’s face or voice inside the figure is labor. Contract it. A historian’s years of edition work is labor. Cite the edition.
**Dual-character debates** can manufacture a verdict the past did not reach. If you stage Lincoln–Douglas, use 1858 texts. If you stage Lincoln × a 2026 avatar, the modern one must carry the anachronism on its face.
**Afterlife of the file.** Decide who may retrain, reskin, or fine-tune the figure in five years. Put it in the contract with the museum. Do not let a marketing team open the cutoff.
---
## 9. Recommended first build
If the brief is “faithful, complete, compelling, three surfaces”:
1. Pick a **Tier 1 writer with a PD corpus and a place** (Douglass at a specific hall; Franklin in a print shop; Curie in a lab; a local Tier 3 with letters).
2. Ship **kiosk + Quest** in season one. Ship **billboard AR** as a postcard of the same monologue, not a second mind.
3. Program clock: one Chautauqua, one object-lesson tour, one labeled dual with a clerk-avatar.
4. Publish the methodology page the same day as the splash screen.
That is the Bonjour Vincent lesson (scholar + letters + venue + afterlife) plus the DiT lesson (do not invent the voice of the dead when a real voice could have been recorded) plus the Chautauqua lesson (always drop character).
---
## See also
- [[Case Study — Jumbo Mana Bonjour Vincent]]
- [[Case Study — Dimensions in Testimony and StoryFile]]
- [[Citations — Historical Virtual Characters]]
- [[Citations — Digital Humans]]