New real-time character rendering demo from Unity - https://unity.com/demos/enemies
Showing posts with label avatars. Show all posts
Showing posts with label avatars. Show all posts
Current Avatar Tech Roundup
Quite a nice roundup of current avatar tech.
https://medium.com/metaverses/digital-humans-the-amazon-echos-of-the-metaverse-5763a2dd50b6
Baby X
One thing I did spot in iHuman was the Baby X work, which apparently was the initial testbed for the Soul Machines technology. Looked a bit more convincing than the old Milo demo.
https://www.soulmachines.com/resources/research/baby-x/
Making of The Heretic: Digital Human tech package for Unity Demo
Nice article on the Unity blog about creating a realistic human avatar.
https://blogs.unity3d.com/2020/07/10/making-of-the-heretic-digital-human-tech-package/?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=engine_global_generalpromo_2020-07-09_heretic-blog&utm_content=link-preview
Samsung Neon
At the CES show Neon (backed by Samsung) showed off its Neon virtual humans. Press response (Engadget, Wired) was somewhat muted and sceptical, the main takeaways appear to be:
- Visuals are good, but really just a version of deep fake, and with uncanny valley issues
- Voice (TTS) is poor quality
- Chatbot engine is pretty basic
- Much of the viral video (eg still above) is actors, not even the Neon avatars!
So, see how far they've got by CES2021 then!
Virtual News Readers
Interesting article in the Guardian yesterday about the Chinese state news agency Xinhua creating a virtual doppelgänger of one of their news readers so he can read and front a highly personalised news service.
A far cry from when I was on Op Raleigh and using the Xinhua HF radio teletype feed to create a daily newspaper!
Fable Studio's "The Lucy Project"
Whilst in Montreal I got the chance to see Wolves in the Wall, a VR piece by Fables Studio.
A young girl alone in an attic bedroom can hear wolves in the wall - can you help her? This piece, based on a book by Neil Gaiman, probably had the best realised virtual human I've seen so far in VR. As you follow her around the small room, crouch down to talk to her or look at what she's drawn it really does feel like your in the room with her. The most notable feature was that when she speaks she always looks at you - no matter where you are standing - I kept try to move to catch her out but never did - awesome response to the headset tracking!
It's interesting that Fable, the studio behind this, has kicked off a whole "Lucy Project" to create a character that is interactive and believable. In many ways Lucy is the closest thing I've seen yet to the old Milo "smoke and mirrors" demo from Lionheart - and of course all the more possible because it has digitised the human so everyone is in the same virtual space. You can read more about Wolves in the Walls at https://fable-studio.com/wolves-in-the-walls/ and https://www.oculus.com/blog/vr-visionaries-fable-studio/.
Update:
- Fable Studios home page: https://fable-studio.com/
- Nice video interview with the Fable team about Virtual Beings.
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