[sldev] Body motion and facial expression tracking, Microsoft did it

Ron Blechner ron at involve3d.com
Tue Jun 2 08:02:20 PDT 2009


Remember Microsoft Table? *grin*

Whether the videos were demos ("fake") or whether they were proof of
concept but functional, one thing I haven't seen pointed out is that
the videos are filmed in a giant living room. I enjoy playing Wii
games, which require 6 - 8 feet or so of space, and I'll quietly gripe
about having to move a piece of furniture to get proper Wii bowling
space. We all dream of the future "Virtual reality room" (a la
Fahrenheit 451 or Star Trek: TNG) where the entire room is your
entertainment space, but let's face it - this is a pretty high-end
solution for short periods of simulation. Would you want to be
standing up and using Second Life for more than half an hour? An hour,
perhaps, if you're at a dance club maybe?

Second Life is not a game platform; it's a 3-D metaverse platform. The
distinction being that it's meant for a broader variety of uses, and
doesn't have the optimizations and features that a strong game
platform would really require. We don't generally log onto Second Life
to go play soccer or space invaders; we log on to socialize, check out
immersive educational and marketing spaces, to create, etc. And we do
them all in this social, multi-user environment. This is key.

Facial expressions and simple gestures are far, far more important
than full-body simulation. Our common interactions in-world won't be
enhanced a whole lot by being able to accurately show how badly I can
dance in meatspace. It will, however, be greatly enhanced if my facial
expressions can be simply translated to my avatar. It's this immersion
building and person-to-person communication that's so key. And that's
why I cheer on Philip when he notes: "Many of the same tricks can be
done using a macbook or webcam, and that is what we are inspired about
right now." Focusing on developing tech when a person is *sitting
down* at their desk and from the shoulders up is absolutely a
benefit-rich area to focus development on. I've encouraged Linden Lab,
blogged about it, and will continue to wave the banner for this
technology and implementation with Second Life.

Regards,

Ron / Hiro

-- 
Ron Blechner
Chief Technology Officer
Involve, Inc
www.involve3d.com




On Tue, Jun 2, 2009 at 9:09 AM, Soft <soft at lindenlab.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Jun 2, 2009 at 7:49 AM, Carlo Wood <carlo at alinoe.com> wrote:
>> On Mon, Jun 01, 2009 at 11:51:22PM -0700, Philippe Bossut (Merov Linden) wrote:
>>> calibration. Also note that the videos by MS are *not* demos (i.e.
>>> live effective code) but staged shooting.
>>
>> I didn't want to mention that... but I bet that those videos are
>> plain FAKE. Those are actors that trained to do those movements,
>> and had to redo them many times before they got it to look a bit
>> realistic (and still fail).
>>
>> I'm sure they got something to work, but those videos are not
>> prove of how it will feel or be in reality imho.
>
> The first is labeled as a conceptualization (lower left toward the
> start). The second video looks realistic to me. Note the lag and
> wobbly positioning. They're not bad, but the first video would make
> one think that MS had solved some problems usually solved with a bunch
> of high precision cameras and dozens of infrared markers.
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