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There's another thing from Snowcrash I've been thinking about - realistic faces. The most exclusive club in the Metaverse was The Black Sun and what made it spe
by martythemaniak 13y ago
There's another thing from Snowcrash I've been thinking about - realistic faces. The most exclusive club in the Metaverse was The Black Sun and what made it special was that the avatars had extremely realistic, life-like expressions, enabling them to visually express emotions and thus enabling a higher form of communication (correct me if I'm wrong, I haven't read it in a decade).
So if we buy into the notion that social presence in VR worlds will be big, somebody's going to have to build this. The technology exists, but it looks very awkward: https://www.fxguide.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/HBT-VFXprog-021.jpg https://www.fxguide.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/HBT-VFXpr...
Not only does that have to be translated into a consumer product, but you need to capture someone's face while they're wearing the VR headset, which makes it even harder. Since VR headsets already touch your face, I would imagine the product would have to be some kind of extension of that - a larger contact area filled with sensors that reconstruct your expression perfectly.
- toufka 13y agoHigh Fidelity [1] (Second Life v2) does this already. It's still early beta, but they've got the ability to map a user's face in real time with enough data-density to transmit emotion, and facial characteristics good enough to recognize a person by their avatar. You are correct, that currently the same camera that does the facial analysis (macbook camera) precludes the VR headset - so you either get to see another in full VR, or you get to transmit your expression in HD. The device to do both is not yet here. [1] http://highfidelity.io/ http://highfidelity.io/
- sixQuarks 13y agoThe founder of Second Life gave a live demonstration of this last night at the Silicon Valley Virtual Reality meetup. I didn't realize how important capturing these small facial gestures was until I saw it myself.
- sergiotapia 13y agoLink?
- anakanemison 13y agoFacebook has thousands of pictures of our faces under a variety of lighting conditions. It would be exciting (or scary, depending on your point of view) to see that data, combined with sensors on the headset itself, to generate realistic-looking face models in the virtual space.
- JabavuAdams 13y agoI just came here to post this. They also recently hired Yann LeCun to head up their AI Lab and also published a ground-breaking face recognition paper. So, they have the data, and they have the people.
- wyager 13y agoI recently came across this effort to map human faces to avatar faces: https://www.facerig.com https://www.facerig.com
- NoodleIncident 13y agoI still can't believe that that's real-time from just a webcam. This won't work as-is without cameras inside the VR goggles, of course, but details, details...
- sp332 13y agoI remember Hiro's ex-girlfriend Juanita explaining that when she designed the facial-expression system, she used him and herself as the models. So they are they only two people who have completely honest, natural expressions in VR.
- cincinnatus 13y agoGo watch 'capturing avatar'
- sliverstorm 13y agoThe Kinect already attempts to reconstruct your expression with the IR/image overlay. It's not the most accurate, but that could just be the software.