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

[Ron Blechner]

Oh, p.s.

I met up with someone at the CT Film Festival this weekend who
confirmed that the whole body interactive demos by Microsoft? STAGED.
Entirely a mock-up demo. The technology apparently works but they're
no where near actual product demo.

-Ron / Hiro

On Mon, Jun 8, 2009 at 11:31 AM, Ron Blechner<ron at involve3d.com> wrote:
> 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/
>>
>>
>



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