Virtual actors - Cheaper, better, faster than humans? A new technology called digital cloning has Hollywood scrambling to come to grips with its promise to both enhance and obsolete today's human actors.

Digital cloner Virtual Celebrity Productions - a computer cloning company, showed off technology in New York last week that can take an actor's image and seamlessly paste it over a live person to give the illusion that the actor is actually on screen.

Starting tomorrow, representatives of Hollywood and the high-tech industry will meet at the Virtual Humans Conference in Los Angeles to discuss the fate of actors - both live and dead - in the digital era.

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