There's a photo of me in the current Information Week. Only it isn't a “photo,” and it isn't “me.”

The picture fixes a specific pattern of electromagnetic radiation and is made using a device called a camera, but it was captured before any photons hit the ether. It is an accurate likeness of my avatar in Croquet, which in turn is a reasonable virtual representation of myself. The caption and indeed the story do not mention me by name, but they are about our work at Qwaq. And I am largely defined by my work. (There is another picture with David and Andreas that is also not a pipe.)

The commercial process to create this avatar is not yet mature enough for everyone to be able to do this today, but the technology is quite sound. I bought a figure for $50 online from a firm in Europe. I imagine the artists were from even further east. The figure was (mostly) automatically processed to be incorporated into a special program by a fellow in yet another country, who I have also never met. I took a single snapshot of myself and fed it into this program, which produced the avatar.