Motion Animation

A company called Image Metrics has caught my eyes the other day, I had seen a video a couple of years ago of an advertising of subscription plan by a couple of actors of an old TV show. The product was new but the actors were long gone… That’s the wonder of “Motion Capture”. The company could realize this by using some pointers on the faces of actors and then reproduce the movements of those pointers on a 3D face that would then be super-imposed on the original animation.

[youtube 3b0R-N6ZQO4]

Now they have gone a step further, they can just film a performance and extract all the movements and facial expression to reproduce or change it to their own desire.

[youtube bLiX5d3rC6o]

If anyone has seen some movies like Total Recal, Equilibrium or read 1984, you can see where and how this technology can be abused. But on the other hand imagine what can be done if you manage to get some of that technology to work for the benefit of the cinema industry. It has already been used is such movies as Surrogate with a young Bruce Willis or Terminator 4 where Arnie is showing up in his young buffed self.

[youtube aY57vJOQIlE]

The possibilities to have performance of dead actors sounds very appealing to some extend. Of course Avatar also showed what can be done as a variance of this technique, the main actors are not really present on screen but it is still a very real performance that they are delivering to achieve the best possible impression of real living beings in front of our eyes.

[youtube 1wK1Ixr-UmM]

Whether we are able to finally cross the uncanny valley is something that I don’t think we (as viewers) will realize; because we won’t be able to see the difference between real and CGI anymore.

The point is that anyone cannot do this at this time on any computer, you need a lot of processor power and a good set of specialist to map your face and build the model (which is one of the business of Image Metrics). But who can say that one day, with improvements of the technique and some increase in our every day PC, we will not be able to just pick up a web cam and have a conference call displaying the face of Gorge Bush or Sean Connery.

Just think about it :-)