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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.'"
Given that TV studios already like reality TV in large part because the cast is cheap, will we start seeing 100% virtual actors? From a business standpoint, intellectual property beats a human face that ages, gets into tabloids ( and potentially ruining the carefully marketed image ) is costly and needs to be recycled regularly.
This may revolutionize the porn industry. Imagine taking all the best porn actresses in their primes and putting them all in one movie. Check that, 1,000 different movies. Now it's possible. On a serious note, the less actual sex involved in making the porn, the less risk to the actors.
Leaving the p0rn industry for a moment, anyone who ever sold a picture of themselves and waived all future rights and royalties is going to be in for a surprise, especially if the picture is them in a birthday suit. You may see congressional action to protect people from having their images used in such ways if they signed "all rights" contracts before the technology became available.
Someday, we will have the ability to create totally new "people" for movies, without relying on any existing images. That way the whole concept of royalties and rights is avoided altogether.
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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...
I bet Homeland Security will love this.
Suspect that someone is a terrorist, but have no evidence at all to support your allegations. - No problem, just whip up a photo-realistic animation of them attending a local bomb-making class. Lather, rinse, repeat.
create exact replicas of long-dead historical figures
I don't think you want to witness this, judging by how the process is described in TFA:
First, an actor's face is coated in ordinary phosphorescent makeup like that worn by children at Halloween. The actors then conduct their performance in a studio surrounded by fluorescent lights and digital cameras.
Dig 'em up, cover 'em in phosphorescent makeup and dangle 'em in front of the camera?
Game makers might achieve photorealistic representations of human appearance and motion, but our new (mostly welcome) digital overlords will still bump into walls, get stuck behind things, get in your way, not look at you while they're talking and generally make mistake and act like they're just computer representations. Game makers for the most part have all the graphical juice they need to convince us of a world's authenticity.
Though I really do enjoy advances in the level of graphical detail that increasing sophistication in hardware and software bring, I feel we need better AI, not fancier graphics . If a game's AI was as big a selling point (and therefore had the same amount of money invested in developing technologies and software for it's advancement) as the graphical prowress of the hardware then I think Alyx in Half Life 2 would probably have gone sentient at this stage.
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I think in some aspects this is bad news for films. I'm completely turned off the idea of watching a movie if I think that they've messed about with an actor's face in order to improve on their expression or fix something. I think it's horrendous. I wonder how many actors will shortly have in their contract that film makers can't animate over their face without written consent? Speaking of which, I wonder how many actors currently have written into their contracts/estates that their image can't be raped after their death in cheesy car adverts etc?
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.
Now I see some are afraid of forged "photos".... Actually, the larger problem with this technology is not that you could possibly manufacture photographic evidence to damage someone else's ambitions, goals, or whatnot; it's that in creating that possibility, hard photo/video evidence loses its credibility in court, and will only continue to do so with time.
I guarantee that when this becomes mainstream (just as most CG geeks knew would happen years ago), that implicating a person of influence/wealth will become nearly impossible, as any time any damaging photo/video evidence pops up (oh, say, like photos of torture at the hands of the US government at Guantanamo or a worse and nameless fascimile) the powerful will declare that it's been manufactured by the opposing side.
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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.
She was apparently a moderate success, a typical idol. Not all idols are shortlived but she was and with so many real girls wanting to be idols who wants to create a virtual one? They are so hard to audition on the couch if you know what I mean.
But yeah, you can see the appeal of a virtual Han Solo or Indiana Jones. Just crank them movies out without having to deal with a grandpa actor.
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Does the film, "The Running Man" ring a bell? And if so, do you remember how technology that was exactly like this, was used? Scary to say in the least...but I am cynic by nature so...
"Realistic animations are already possible, has been for ages, it's called motion capture."
Motion capture doesn't work for the face. You could be thinking about performance capture, which does capture the face, but there's debate about how effective that really is. In any event, no, it has NOT been here for ages. If one actor really can drive the actions of another, this is a Big Deal TM. You would not believe the amount of work that is done to deal with facial movements on a character. Check out the extras DVDs on King Kong or I, Robot if you're really curious about it.
"I only see the use of this technology for movie to game adaptions were they can quickly copy a real life actor to 3D. For the rest, why would you want to hire multiple actors to do the same thing what a couple of voice actors, motion capture actors and animators can do."
Funny, the article had a couple of interesting ideas in that department. The character aging in reverse gag, for example, is a rather interesting one. As for the latter half of your question, the answer is time. The end result is a moving character. It's time consuming to hand-key animation, not to mention the potential for lack of subtlety. If you can just throw one talented actor into a scanner and get the performance you need with minimal clean-up, you're in a better place.
"Besides, how would you use this technology in a non-realistic game."
Have you played San Andreas?
I realize a lot of people in this thread don't see the point. Just remember that the human body is the hardest thing to get right when it comes to CG. Remember all those complaints in the Star Wars prequels and the Matrix Trilogy about the digital doubles not looking right? Contour may or may not drag us from that rut, I couldn't tell you. What I can tell you is that it's still a problem today and it's a Good Thing if they can find a solution that allows the talents of actors to drive the performance of a CG character. The possibilities are a lot broader than a lot of you can imagine. Go read an issue or two of Cinefex. You'll be surprised at what technologies are already making a huge difference in modern movies, even though you probably never have noticed.
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