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

[Ron Blechner]

The problem with the handshake:

In short - it's 2 seconds worth of interaction. That's a tiny amount
of reward for a tremendous amount of work it would take to make it
better. And, there are already handshake and bow animations - they
don't line up with another avatar, but doing all the work to make
handshakes doesn't even create a new function - it just polishes an
existing one.

Compare that with putting in effort to do better facial animations -
that would affect 100% of the time of interaction between two people.
And consider that facial animation programming is *client-side* by
nature, and doesn't require breaking apart and redoing the avatar code
in Second Life to the degree that handshakes / puppeteering does.
That's a helluva lot more results for a helluva lot less effort.

I'd also like to add that, as Lawson pointed out, there is cultural
bias. According to Neilsen, there are 170 million Americans actively
using social media. There are twice that in China alone. China has 20%
of the world's population. Are we here to make a Western metaverse, or
a global one based on ideals not bound by one country, or one culture?
The reason we handshake instead of bow is because the West has
controlled the vast amounts of wealth in the world. Like it or not,
the West is spending its Wealth and a tremendous amount is going to
the East. In 20 years - we all may be bowing, like it or not.

I don't want to ruffle too many features, but it's an important
exercise to escape one's own assumptions and biases when debating
functionality with a platform whose stated goal is to be "a new
country", as Rosedale would say.

And to bring this back - the larger issue is that people tend to get
caught up in particular niceties like handshakes and miss
bigger-picture items. What good are handshakes if the rest of the
conversation is less meaningful because it lacks facial expression?

I say, FORGET puppeteering. Forget handshakes. Let's focus our efforts
on something much easier to accomplish, and with far more impact on
Second Life. Facial expressions from video.

*runs off to blog these thoughts*


-- 
Ron Blechner
Chief Technology Officer
Involve, Inc
www.involve3d.com
SL: Hiro Pendragon


p.s. PLUG! http://secondtense.blogspot.com

On Fri, Jun 5, 2009 at 1:33 PM, Tateru Nino<tateru.nino at gmail.com> wrote:
> Maybe it isn't really about handshakes, and more about general
> lining-up-of-body-parts between avatars? :)
>
> However, for most people in first-world western cultures, a handshake is the
> frequently sole form of socially allowable physical contact between two
> people who aren't intimates at some level. That makes it strongly symbolic.
>
> For handshake you can substitute a few variations: Knuckle-bumps, high-fives
> and such, but they're all basically a handshake with different emotional
> flavoring.
>
> Ron Blechner wrote:
>
> Question:
>
> Why are handshakes so important that they are much more of a topic of
> discussion of implementation, against facial expressions?
>
> -Ron / Hiro
>
> On Fri, Jun 5, 2009 at 7:34 AM, Argent
> Stonecutter<secret.argent at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> On 2009-06-04, at 08:55, Jan Ciger wrote:
>
>
> Argent, read my comment to Tigro's mail. It wouldn't work. At least
> not
> in a nice way. For reaching and grasping you need much more IK than
> just
> the three arm joints and then you are hitting a severely
> under-constrained and computationally expensive problem.
>
>
> That's why you don't try and solve it computationally. You don't
> replace normal animation, you use this for minor adjustments to the
> existing animation, and you limit the strength of the adjustment to
> small angles and specific joints.
>
> So it's down to the person selecting the base animation and providing
> the strength and possibly range (either distance or angle).
>
>
>
> E.g. in one case I have seen the solver to keep the hands next to the
> avatar's waist but stick the waist forward to reach a goal.
>
>
> Wouldn't happen, unless the person selected the waist as the joint
> that would move, and unless the waist was already close to the goal.
>
>
>
> IK is a nice tool, but extremely hard to use unless you have an
> animator
> guiding it.
>
>
> Which is the point.
>
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> --
> Tateru Nino
> http://dwellonit.taterunino.net/
>
>