Robert Downey Jr. (Photo: Wikipedia.org)

If you turned to Wikipedia for a pre-Avengers deep dive into the Marvel canon or refresher on Harry Potter's defenses against the dark arts, you are apparently not alone. What's more, your digital breadcrumbs might be a preview of coming box-office receipts. A team of researchers has shown that Wikipedia data can predict how popular a film will be.

A team from the Budapest University of Technology and Economics looked at 312 movies that came out in 2010 (think Inception, Toy Story 3 and Twilight: Eclipse) and built a mathematical model that measured the number of readers and editors for the movie's Wiki page. The model's data was juxtaposed with box office earnings and showed almost a 77 percent correlation between popularity on Wikipedia and big opening weekends.

Not sure if we need a complicated math model to understand this though. It's pretty obvious that movies who have the most rabid fan bases are the ones sitting in front of Wikipedia making sure that everything is accurate. After all, having a stubborn commitment to accuracy is one of the cornerstones of nerd culture.

Nerds are a good explanation for the number of editors that popular movies have, but what about the readers? They're probably the movie geeks who like to turn to their friends in an Iron Man premier and whisper "Pssst, did you know Robert Downey Jr. has performed on six soundtracks?" Or they might be the impatient people who need to spoil movies for themselves before they even get in line for popcorn.

Avatar, the highest grossing movie of all time, has a section of its Wikipedia page dedicated to postage stamps. Need we say more?

LaGuardia Airport General Manager Tom Bosco introduces Marie.

Wednesday was the first day on the job for Marie, LaGuardia Airport’s newest customer service hire: a virtual avatar designed to answer questions and help guide visitors through the airport.

The round-faced, chestnut-haired young woman we saw before us was merely a video of a human woman--the Port Authority wouldn't disclose the actress's name--projected on to a 2D flat screen shaped like a woman's body. The static effect was less Tupac hologram and more Tour Guide Barbie™.

Standing in the arrivals area of Terminal B, Marie spews a stream of basic information for arriving passengers, including the location of the bathrooms and baggage claims, and directions to various forms of ground transportation. In a rare moment of silence, the avatar shifts her eyes pointedly from left to right, performatively twiddling her thumbs.

“You can see, when nobody’s asking her any questions, she looks around, she smiles, she twiddles her thumbs a bit,” Tom Bosco, the General Manager of the airport remarked with a laugh, visibly charmed by the new addition to the airport staff.

“She can answer questions?” Betabeat inquired enthusiastically. Mr. Bosco quickly conceded, that no, the avatar was not capable of processing or responding to human interaction, explaining that the technology currently plays a 90-second sound loop which reactivates anytime a person is within 30 feet of the apparatus.

“But she answers the basic questions a customer might have, like where are the restrooms, where do I catch the train, where’s the departure board, those kind of things,” Mr. Bosco explained.

A group of LaGuardia’s live customer service employees were less generous when assessing the avatar’s utility. “If you’re walking, are you really going to stop and wait until she gets to the part about the bathroom, or are you going to look for a sign,” one customer service representative who wished to remain unnamed asked rhetorically.

Marie, named after the wife of the airport’s namesake, Fiorello LaGuardia, is one of three identical avatars debuting on behalf of the Port Authority of New York & New Jersey this summer. “Libby” appeared at Newark Liberty International Airport on July 27, and “Sarah” begins work at John F. Kennedy Airport on Thursday. Each installation cost the Port Authority $60,000.

“We think it’s a good investment,” Mr. Bosco said confidently, explaining that the three avatars will undergo a trial period of six months before any decisions are made to add more.

Emphasizing that the technology will not be replacing human staff, Mr. Bosco assured us that the avatar "supplements the existing staff.” And indeed—near the end of her minute-and-a-half long spiel, Marie informs her audience that they can also visit a nearby welcome desk or talk to “other” customer service representatives for further assistance.

Mr. Bosco explained that he also hoped Marie would help with the airport’s initiative to reduce "hustling" by unlicensed cab drivers by warning visitors, “For your own safety, don’t accept rides from individuals soliciting rides.” Other tips are a little more painfully obvious: "Once aboard the bus, listen to the announcements for your stop,” Marie perkily advises.

The point, Mr. Bosco insisted, is that this newfangled technology is more likely to catch people's attention. “If you saw a TV screen, would you pay attention to it, or would you pay attention to her?” he argued, clearly believing the answer to be self-evident. Yet despite some reports from Newark Liberty that passengers found Libby to be “freaky” or even “scary,” most passersby at LaGuardia seemed largely unfazed. Indeed, as much as she captivated Mr. Bosco, many failed to fully register Marie's virtual presence.

Can you recognize the real me?

In the annals of bizzare pitches we have received from PR firms over the years, this one kind of takes the cake.

"Ready to visit your favorite social media pages and web sites to converse in real-time with the page owner? Can you imagine asking your friend how the big date went and getting an immediate, spoken answer from a digital clone? How about a customer asking specific questions about your line of products and having a life-like face of the company give a spoken response in conjunction with a set of images with further detail? It's not some sci-fi take on tomorrow's social media. It's today's reality with the release of Intellitar for Social Networks. The company, which first introduced interactive digital clones less than a year ago, has begun to move it's technology off it's own Virtual Eternity application and onto popular social networking sites. The first set of intellitars (aka intelligent avatars) are moving out across MySpace today. In the coming months, users of additional social networks, including Facebook and Orkut, will be joining the cloned masses."

Turns out Intellitar CEO Don Davidson wanted to create a way to communicate with his grandkids and great-grandkids after he passed away. Once he built the intelligent avatar system, he decided it would add the perfect "human" touch to social networks.

To create an Intellitar, head over to VirtualEternity.com, snap a photo, answer a quick battery of personal questions, and tweak the animiation. Viola, a perfect clone, nearly indistinguishable from your flesh and blood presence.

Why post to someone's Facebook wall or ask them a question via direct message on Twitter when their Intellitar can chat face to face. I am a Harmony Seeking Idealist, for which the system recommends a Male Neutral Brain.

Like most of the world, I don't use Myspace much these days. But since people no doubt end up at my profile on occasion, it would be nice for me to leave a clone there. No doubt the struggling social network, which News Corp is in the process of trying to unload, is happy to for any surge in user activity, whether it be human, or clone.

I've been promised an embed code, but in the meantime you can chat with my clone by searching for Benjamin Popper over at VirtualEternity.com.