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Digital Replicas May Change Games and Film
Carl Bialik from WSJ writes "Steve Perlman is touting technology that he says can create animated digital reproductions of the human body that are as accurate as photographs, the Wall Street Journal reports. From the article: 'Game makers could use the system, called Contour, to create very realistic animated characters in videogames with fully controllable movements and facial expressions. Film makers could use the technology as a kind of digital makeup, changing an actor's looks or words or switch camera angles without costly retakes. The technology can even substitute one actor's face for another's and create exact replicas of long-dead historical figures.'"
And to deal with your second question, textures will still be added after capturing structure and movement information, so you could make people blue, tweak the models or whatever after the fact still. (Like in the example, the teeth, skin, hair etc are all being slotted back in from photo's)
Did you go near the article? Yes yes, I know, I must be new here...
Yeah, it sounds sort of like chroma keying turned on its head. Rather than shooting the actor against a background that's easy to remove, you just paint the parts that you do want to show up with the fluorescent paint. I'd guess that this would make shooting in an ad hoc environment much easier. No need to set up a soundstage with a green screen, just set up the special lighting rig wherever you want.
Definitely a clever and newsworthy idea.
The /. comment is misleading. The technique to digitally capture the surface of a human body will not help make digital movies with no actors. You still need a real actor to do the job; the described technique only projects the original actor's image on the new actor. The age of the digital actor is not here yet, although this technique may be useful for ressurrecting dead actors.
In order to make fully digital actors, there are several problems to be solved:
1) animation that follows real life physics. Although digital animation has made great steps, the human motion can not be fully synthesized yet in a way that it totally fools the eye.
2) realistic voice synthesis. Computers still can not make realistic synthetic voice.
3) putting emotion into the above. In some day truly believable synthetic animation and voice will be achieved using only digital techniques. But what about the emotions? humans can do many emotions at the same time, all with subtle expressions, and using their face and voice in various subtle manners.
I would love to have truly believable synthespians. It would allow my favorite series to keep going on for ever. For example, there would be no problem doing a new Star Trek movie with Kirk and Spock (many fans have disagreed with the new movie due to the new actors that will be playing Kirk and Spock). But I just don't see it in the near future.
Spiderman was a Sam Raimi flick ... how else would Bruce Campell have gotten a cameo?
But I do agree that I like his "practical effects" and overall style.