Katty-ko

Milan, Dec. 4 (Reuters): A Chilean soap-opera star, a beauty from ancient Pompeii and a freckled tomboy hardly make an average beauty pageant line-up.

But the three faced off in the first world-wide digital beauty contest which to the surprise of many frenzied online fans was won by a woman who is virtually real flesh and bones. ?Virtual models are not the anti-real, they are a different representation of reality,? said Franz Cerami, the organiser of Miss Digital World (www.missdigitalworld.com).

Each of the contestants had to provide glamourous shots of hi-resolution divas, complete with date of birth and body measurements.

Chilean Rodolfo Perez Ayala decided that no figment of his imagination could beat the beauty of his wife, Katty Kowaleczko, so he hired artist Flavio Parra to recreate her from pixels.

Kowaleczko, who plays Paula Sandoval in the popular Latin American soap opera Tentacion, was transformed into Katty-ko and won the digital contest with more than 17,000 online votes.