I have seen the future of computer-generated video game animation, her name is Emily, and Emily is not real -- or is she? See for yourself in the following clip just released from 3D facial animation company Image Metrics, and which I read about in The Times Online ("Lifelike animation heralds new era for computer games") this morning.
Meet Emily. The face on the "person" talking in this clip. Emily is not real. (Credit: Video created by OTOY and Paul Debevec.)
Some of Image Metrics clients: Capcom, Activision, 2K Games, ATI, EA Games, Epic Games, Konami, Eidos, THQ, Vivendi, Sony, and more. They've also done significant animation work for movies like Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix and dozens of video games, from Devil May Cry 4 and Grand Theft Auto IV to Uncharted: Drake's Fortune and Unreal Tournament 3.
So what do you think? Has Emily "overleapt a long-standing barrier known as 'uncanny valley'"? The perception that computer-generated faces look less real as they approach human likeness?
This technology is advancing at a tremendous pace. Soon, playing video games will be like "playing a movie".
Andy Williams
GameJobHunter, Inc.
Get a video game job at http://www.GameJobHunter.com/
Way cool! Something about her seems not quite right, though....I think her mouth is too wide...?
The voice is what convinces me, more than the visual; altho' the visual is very compelling! I'll guess that the voice is a "real" actress. The technology for producing realistic human voice probably has to catch up to the visual technology.
The FACE is the only computer-generated part, right? And it definitely looks odd. When they show the real actress at the end of the clip, you can clearly see that her face appears real, while the face at the beginning is 'uncanny'.
it looks amazingly realistic.. but the problem is this is a low-rez video clip from YouTube. Of course it looks great. The question is how real does Emily look in hi-def on a 40-inch display?
My guess a LOT of life-like animation looks killer on a crappy YouTube video over the Net... I wan't to see this at a minimum in hi-quaility Web video before I get too spooked by Emily's synthetic charm.
Very nice work. If you compare the real face (at the end) with the animation, it helps you see the couple of things that are not *quite* right. The main thing is the corners of her mouth and chin - they don't crease or dimple as much as they should when smiling or pronouncing a long "E", so her smile is a little creepy. I think it's often the missing imperfections - small movements, bumps and lumps - that give things away. But if I wasn't looking for it, I reckon I might have been fooled on this one.
Most certainly 40 gig PS3 is backward compatable with PSone. i know becuse i own one and play PSone games on the 40 gig model.