The perfect balance with current technology seems like a good goal in a development sector as fast as 3D technology. The Ready Player Me blog made an overview of what was learned over seven years of developing 3D avatars, and starts from a principle presented by a New Yorker magazine cover illustrator to talk about the subject. According to Cristoph Niemann, the illustrator who featured his work on more than 30 covers of the magazine, an idea cannot be too abstract or too realistic. He exemplifies: the color red is not enough for us to know that the subject is love, at the same time that the hyper-realistic drawing of a heart can seem disgusting, and not romantic.
Everything has a right balance.
A person can create an idealized 3D version of themselves from a single selfie, captured by a camera with internet access. Abstract 3D avatars are very simple
It’s hard to show our expressions in games with a simple and abstract visual style. In Minecraft, the avatar’s face measures 8×8 pixels. There’s barely enough room to fit the eyes and mouth – not enough to represent a wide range of emotions. In fact, Minecraft doesn’t offer any expressions other than flashing compatible character skins.
Showing your identity in a world made of big pixels is not a simple task either. You can give someone a general idea of what you look like and what colors you like to wear. But it would be difficult to distinguish, for example, a black denim jacket from an elegant blazer.
On the other end of the spectrum, we have hyper-realistic avatars. In Rogue One, Disney created a digital version of Wilhuff Tarkin based on the actor who played him a few decades earlier – Peter Cushing. This was made possible by advanced motion-tracking technology and an actor (Guy Henry) who learned to behave and speak like Cushing.
The same technique is used in modern games like Cyberpunk 2077, and the challenge is making the perfect representation. Otherwise, we experience an effect called the uncanny valley. If the humanoid character or object does not perfectly resemble a human, we tend to have negative emotions. In other words, we’re scared.
In the film and game industries, studios have access to and can afford advanced tracking solutions. But they also spend thousands of hours in post-processing to make the characters look like real humans. For the consumer, there is no way to use a hyper-realistic avatar based on the user’s appearance. Modern games often have advanced character creators, but customization options are limited to predefined values and features only.
These avatars are also unable to represent the player’s expressions. And there are no mass market facial tracking devices available that can produce results comparable to recent Star Wars movies. Not to mention the challenge of rendering super detailed 3D characters, especially in games like Call of Duty: Warzone with a hundred players on a single server.
According to the Ready Player Me Blog, the right avatar solution is simple. Coming back to the mystery valley concept – it’s called a valley because we don’t just like humanoids that look almost like humans. But we tend to like slightly abstract representations of humans, like cartoon and game characters. These avatars are more detailed than those in Minecraft, making it easier to show someone’s identity and emotions. On the other hand, they aren’t very detailed, making it simpler to show basic emotions without scaring someone off. They are also less difficult to render for average hardware, even in large-scale games like Fortnite.
The current state of consumer technology allows us to use these simpler avatars to have social interactions in virtual worlds. For example, there are software-based solutions to emulate mouth movement, such as Oculus Lipsync. We can also get a good representation of body movement with the controllers that come with the virtual reality headsets available today. This is essential for getting non-verbal communication right in virtual worlds.
Finding the Right Balance for 3D Avatars
When the Ready Player Me team started using Wolf3D seven years ago, they built full-body scanners to create the hyper-realistic human models desired by movie and game studios. When Facebook acquired Oculus in 2014, the same team realized that 3D avatars would play an important role in the future, and shifted focus, deciding to make it easier for anyone to create their own 3D avatar.
The first step in this direction was easy-to-use egg-shaped face scanners. The team sent them to many places across the world, including museums in Estonia and Finland, E3 game shows in Las Vegas, and Paramount Studios in Hollywood.
The next step was to make scanning even more accessible, using data from tens of thousands of high-resolution scans to create a software-based solution. At this stage, the takeaway was that people didn’t want an avatar that looked exactly like them – they wanted something more. It’s like Instagram profiles – no one posts pictures of their dirty dishes (please prove me wrong). Instead, we opted to create an idealistic version of our lives with photos from trips to Bali, plates full of sushi and selfies from Coachella.
Source: Ready Player Me
Image credits: Pixabay | Clker-Free-Vector-Images
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