'Ave An Avatar

Populate

Tim Trevan
3D SCanners Ltd
Tim.Travan@3DScanners.com

The Populate project is moving towards a successful conclusion. In October 1998, the first personal photorealistic avatars were made with the prototype equipment. By January, the prototype booth was assembled and much of the software re-written into an integrated package, resulting in higher-quality avatars.

Since then, many improvements have been made. A new, production AvatarBooth has been designed and will be launched commercially at SIGGRAPH ‘99 in Los Angeles in August. A launch deal, worth several times the EU funding for the Populate project, has already been agreed with a flagship customer but, for client reasons, will not be announced until January 2000. SIGGRAPH 99 will also be used to demonstrate the AvatarPlayer software that has been developed to animate the avatars produced in the booth.

The results of Populate are already feeding into other EU projects. Under HomeVR, further improvements to the basic avatar mesh model are being made — to upgrade it from a segmented avatar to a seamless avatar and to reduce the polygon count — so that it can be used in interactive, real-time 3D environments. Creating the seamless avatar prevents holes appearing at the avatar’s joints when it is animated. Plans to personalise other aspects of the avatar — its speech, facial expressions, body motion, stance and gait — are well in hand.

The Avatar Booth

A new company, AvatarMe Ltd, has been spun off from 3D Scanners Ltd to commercialise Populate’s results.

Populate has met its objectives. It promised to address how the reality of a person should be captured, how the data sets should be converted into a humanoid avatar, what the market needs for such avatars are, and what quality levels are required by the market to meet each of these needs. By opting for a photographic method of data capture, and by using silhouette extraction from the photographs to distort the generic avatar model to the shape of the individual posing, Populate has solved the first two questions in a cost-effective manner — and with a price structure that should permit the development of a mass market for photorealistic avatars.

From their market research, the partners now also have a clear idea of the quality requirements for each potential application. What is not yet clear is which of the many potential applications will provide the spearhead into the mass market. But with a major deal already in the bag for the AvatarBooths (which should generate many thousands of avatars), the partners will continue to address that problem with an open mind and a high degree of confidence.

So watch out for an AvatarBooth near you soon. And go an ’ave yourself an avatar.

Populate web site: www.3dscanners.com/populate/home.htm

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