Extraordinarily lifelike characters are to begin appearing in films and computer games thanks to a new type of animation technology.
This is animated. Yes, it’s not an april fool joke.
Emily - the woman in the above animation - was produced using a new modelling technology that enables the most minute details of a facial expression to be captured and recreated.
She is considered to be one of the first animations to have overleapt a long-standing barrier known as ‘uncanny valley’ - which refers to the perception that animation looks less realistic as it approaches human likeness.
Researchers at a Californian company which makes computer-generated imagery for Hollywood films started with a video of an employee talking. They then broke down down the facial movements down into dozens of smaller movements, each of which was given a ‘control system’.
The team at Image Metrics - which produced the animation for the Grand Theft Auto computer game - then recreated the gestures, movement by movement, in a model. The aim was to overcome the traditional difficulties of animating a human face, for instance that the skin looks too shiny, or that the movements are too symmetrical.
Facial Motion Capturing by Image Metrics
“The subtlety of the timing of eye movements is a big one. People also have a natural asymmetry - for instance, in the muscles in the side of their face. Those types of imperfections aren’t that significant but they are what makes people look real.”
Previous methods for animating faces have involved putting dots on a face and observing the way the dots move, but Image Metrics analyses facial movements at the level of individual pixels in a video, meaning that the subtlest variations - such as the way the skin creases around the eyes, can be tracked.
“There’s always been control systems for different facial movements, but say in the past you had a dial for controlling whether an eye was open or closed, and in one frame you set the eye at 3/4 open, the next 1/2 open etc. This is like achieving that degree of control with much finer movements.
For many years now, animators have come up against a barrier known as “uncanny valley”, which refers to how, as a computer-generated face approaches human likeness, it begins take on a corpse-like appearance similar to that in some horror films.
As a result, computer game animators have purposely simplified their creations so that the players realise immediately that the figures are not real.
“There came a point where animators were trying to create a face and there was a theory of diminishing returns,” said Raja Koduri, chief technlology officer in graphics at AMD, the chip-maker.
But he said that the line between what was real and what was rendered would not be blurred completely until 2020.
There have been several advances in computer-generated imagery (CGI) in recent years. One project at the University of Southern California involves placing an actor inside a giant metallic orb which fires more than 3,000 lights from a range of different angles - and with different degrees of intensity - at the actor while he or she is are being filmed performing an action.
The image captured by the camera can then be transported into another piece of film and the lighting effect (on the actor) chosen according to the ambient lighting in the scene.
[from TimesOnline]
Holy crap, if you have watched the first video, it shows more interesting things to come, and more dangers to come.
In the future:
-You can marry a 3d girl, because she is so lifelike and looks every part like a human. (no more sex dolls: Japanese weird dolls)
-You are psychologically screwed, because you murder and kill at such realism that it blurs reality and virtual reality. You are also emotionally impaired because blood is such a common thing. You just shot your neighbor, good job!
-Your Second Life will play a big part in your life. There will be no reason for you to walk or run to a far place, because in your Second Life you can do so at the click of the button. While you may only survive on $1 per day, in Second Life you might just be a millionaire. But ok, you can’t feed your stomach in there, that’s the only reality gap.
