Back in the early ’80s, I saw a movie called Looker. With Susan Dey of The Partridge Family in the lead role, it wasn’t Oscar material. But the premise behind the movie was cool and in retrospect, prescient: An evil entertainment corporation called Digital Matrix develops the technology to make life-like 3D scans of actors, and then uses those scans to make TV commercials. The actors are never required again after being scanned (so bad things happen to them).

Back then the technology seemed fantastical.

But 30 years later, science fiction has become reality. Several companies, including one called Light Stage, have developed exactly that technology, and it’s mind-blowing. It’s now conceivable that actors could become obsolete in just a few years.

In the meantime, a variant on the technology has come to desktops. Montreal-based Xtranormal might lack the sophistication and realism of Light Stage, but it’s easy to imagine that it’s only a matter of time before it does (in the past two years the software has improved significantly).

With Xtranormal, you can make a movie simply by creating your own script, choosing a “set” and then “casting it,” all in your browser. It’s cheap and dead simple to use. The site now boasts 2,000,000 users a month, and almost 10 million videos produced to date, including a few that have become internet sensations.

And as was predicted so many years ago in that bad sci-fi flick, ad agencies can now make commercials without having to pay actors, as this Ad Age article points out.

The spots may not be good, but in the case of the GEICO spots, the rudimentary nature of the technology has been cleverly been worked into the concept. In just a few years, however, agencies will be able to produce top quality spots without having to book expensive studio time. Will this mean that the time and cost to produce ads will be cut dramatically?