Intelligent Artifice

All Points Bulletin’s character creation system March 8, 2008

Filed under: Graphics, Technology — Jurie @ 3:41

Here is a video of All Points Bulletin’s character creation system:

It’s very sophisticated. I’ve done some work on avatar systems and there’s a metric ton’s worth of nasty little issues - mainly related to 3D overlapping. You know, hats on hair and stuff like that. Hoodies were my favorite - a coat that’s also a hat! Doing it right, as Real Time Worlds seems to have done, takes an enormous amount of work.

There’s a cute industry in-joke at the end of the video by the way.

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Phun: a simulated physics playground February 21, 2008

Filed under: Technology — Jurie @ 3:56

Phun: a simulated physics playground

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Swedish graduate student Emil Ernerfeldt created the program Phun, a 2D physics playground, and has made it free to download for non-commercial use.
He demonstrates it in a zenful YouTube video, where he creates devices like cars and piston engines in seconds using simple shapes.

Nice interface!

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Vocaloid 2: Yamaha’s anime song generator September 21, 2007

Filed under: Fun, Music, Technology — Jurie @ 10:51

Here is an interesting article about Vocaloid 2, a program developed by Yamaha that, given lyrics and a melody, generates anime-style singing.

The singing sounds like a normal human voice modified by digital effects, such as one can hear in some of the music kids listen to these days (and I am assuming here that those songs do not use synthesized singing). Apparently the software is a big hit in Japan (go go user-generated content - the Innovator’s Dilemma at work again).

I wonder if singing is easier to synthesize than speech. I wonder if this is related to the fact that accents are harder to make out in singing than in speech. Further restraining the problem domain to the kind of singing one hears in anime-style songs probably makes things even easier.

Still, a promising step on the way to usable text-to-speech. I can easily imagine an anime-style game using this technology.

(Via Boing Boing.)

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Intel To Acquire Havok September 20, 2007

Filed under: Industry, Technology — Jurie @ 2:26

Read Intel’s press release.

I wonder what that means for Havok on non-Intel platforms. Like all current consoles. Is it RenderWare all over again? Well, probably not, but it might have some amusing effects on the middleware market.

(Thanks, Tobi!)

Update: Since I just phrased it so nicely in an ICQ conversation about the similarities between this acquisition and EA buying Criterion: I don’t think Intel will screw up Havok (at least, not in the way EA arguably screwed up the Renderware bits of Criterion). Intel doesn’t need Havok for its own development. Intel needs other people to need Havok and Intel needs other people to buy the CPUs that Havok needs. Intel has a history of buying companies that produce software that requires heavy processing power. Still, I’d worry if I were in Havok’s AMD optimization team.

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Fix8 Brings Computer Generated Animation To The Webcam June 3, 2007

Filed under: Graphics, Technology — Jurie @ 13:37

I blogged about Logitech QuickCam Effects about a year ago. Today TechCrunch is reporting about fix8, a company offering a more advanced form of this technology.

fix8 combines video, animation and instant messaging that allows users to create their own partial or full custom avatars that mimic human movement.

At the heart of fix8 is H.E.A.R.T. (Human Expression Analysis and Rendering Technology), which digitizes human expressions, gestures, and movements via webcam, enabling users to create, interact, and share their creations across the web, TV, and soon mobile phones.

I am sure we can all see where this is going (step 1: YouTube, step 2: damn kids, step 3: porn, step 4: the uncanny valley, step 5: lawsuits). Pretty cool to see this running on consumer hardware. The demo video is freaky though.

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Microsoft Surface, a multi-touch interface device May 30, 2007

Filed under: Technology, User Interface Design — Jurie @ 9:27

Popular Mechanics has a video of Microsoft Surface, a table-sized multi-touch interface device. It is based on the work of Jeff Han, whose work I have blogged about before. Although it seems remarkably similar, I am not sure if this is the same technology that is used in Apple’s iPhone. However, I somehow doubt there will be a real patent dispute here.

What is interesting about Microsoft Surface is that it combines a huge touch screen with cameras that allow the system to detect objects such as cameras and phones. It looks cool in the video, but I wonder if the system could discriminate between two wireless devices (both using Wifi, say).

(If you’re interested in this: See previous blog posts on the work of Edward Tse, which is somewhat similar, as well as on Sony’s DataTiles. And I thought I linked to a video showing an interaction between a large horizontal screen and physical objects in order to make music, but I can’t find it.)
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