A minor history of the Chronivac brand...
1.0 was too powerful, it basically turned people into a god or goddess and their thoughts effected reality. Insanity ensued and Transdem reset reality to a time before the first shipments went out. At least that's what the conspiracy theories say.
2.0 was the first version that made it to the market. It had a 300 foot range, but was limited to very general feature modifications. Changing height, weight, or age would give mixed results, and undoing them wouldnt necessarily return you to how you were. Gaining 30 lbs might make you fat instead of muscular, and then removing 30 lbs may remove 30 lbs of muscle.
3.0 was the introduction of profiles. Saving and reverting accurately was now possible allowing features to be loaded, modified, applied and switched back and forth easily. The range was further reduced to 100 feet due to a number of unsavory lawsuits with the prior version. Settings now allowed for, but unfortunately required, extremely detailed instruction when modifying. Gaining 30 lbs could now be designated as muscle, but you would need to specify what goes to which muscle groups. Some have died accidentally by including their cardiac muscle to put on pounds of mass and then their heart was too thick to properly pump blood... Partial profile modification scripts became available over time. Allowing the addition of skills, or features. If you had a Chronivac, but never came in contact with an action star, you could download the physical profile from someone who had, or share the memories of a book you read or class you took. These packages sometimes came at great cost, and were often buggy, but some were downright malicious.
4.0 Beta tests are rumored to be starting and promise significant interface enhancements most notably a wealth of high quality online packages. Soon, gone will be the days of needing to specify eye diameter and nostril size. Strange comments regarding awareness and reality alteration options have surfaced but we will just have to wait and see if that makes it to the commercial release.
But for now, 3.7 is the latest version we can get on the market...
No industry was changed as much as the entertainment industry. With a few clicks any actor or actress could easily look like any other person physically. The script was loaded into the actor or actress along with any physical and sometimes mental modifications. Becoming the character all the way down to the thinking patterns created very believable and engaging characters.
Soon, however, network executives added to the basic contract that every employee got their profile taken, and their profile became the property of the network, for safety reasons of course.
Within months of this starting, Chronivac technicians, or Cronies as they came to be called, had expertly pulled acting training and experience from their pool of talent. Seemingly overnight, casting calls went from seeking talented individuals to accepting anyone (looking/pretending to be) 18 or older who is willing to be transformed. Younger with consenting adult.
Stunt doubles became unnecessary, If you get hurt, your profile will be reverted to how you were at the beginning of the day. A profile of a demolitions expert, choreographer, martial arts expert, fire safety and medical expert... and so on, was all you needed, and you could have your entire cast and crew, loaded with all these specialty skills.
Immediately the pay for talented actors fell to nothing as people came in off the streets wanting a chance to be part of a movie or TV show for a day. Whole families made a day of visiting the studio trying to get on set or working on the crew. Months passed like this and the novelty of it wore off.
Soon, every other person you spoke to had been, or had a family member who had been part of something for a day. By this time, the networks had changed their budgets to rely on volunteer labor which had been consistent but now dwindled. They could make anyone skilled to fit the part, but now needed to draw people back into doing the job for no money.
Desperate networks seeking to draw volunteers back began offering modifications to a volunteer's base profile after 5 days worth of work. A skill or a trait, for a weeks worth of work was suddenly worth taking a week of vacation for. Become a smoker or non-smoker, have perfect teeth, get that tattoo removed, have perfect vision, return your hair color to its pre-graying luster, lose some fat, gain industry knowledge from one of the other volunteers, or walk out with the karate knowledge you used in the action scene. There was no limit to the number of tweaks you could get. 52 for a year's worth of effort...
Business was once again booming, and it was easy enough to clone one Cronie into as many as were needed to process the volunteer's profiles and create new profile mod packages. Although they only had a few emitters, the software was free to distribute to as many computers as necessary. Very quickly the network had a huge array of profiles and mod packages available for use in movies, TV, and payment. All this was organized with tags. such as male, Caucasian, facial, eyebrows, brown... and popular items were tagged such.