Peter Champ 3D Scanners Ltd pc@3dscanners.com

Stephen Crampton 3D Scanners Ltd sjc@3dscanners.com

Reedited by Helen MacLean Odense University helen@mip.ou.dk

POPULATE is a 27-month project which began on the 1st July 1997. It works on the assumption that there will soon be a pressing need for people to have representations of themselves - Avatars - which will act for them in Inhabited Information Spaces. These Avatars will be humanoid, will be captured in AvatarBooths, and POPULATE will build and operate a functional AvatarBooth as part of the results of the project.

What are Avatars? Avatars are the electronic representations of human beings in virtual environments. Avatars can take any shape or form - from a simple icon to a fully rendered, photorealistic representation of the human form.

Fantasy or reality? On the Internet, Avatars are in the early, experimental stages. Some Avatars are icons with floating name tags, some have bit-mapped photos of faces pasted onto 'Caspar'-like blobs. In contrast, the expectation of the partners in the POPULATE project is that people's Avatars will be recognised in an IIS in a similar way to that in which we recognise people in real life. About half the time, in the real world, you first recognise someone from behind - in a hallway or a shop, for example - without even seeing their face. You take in their whole physical form - their build, their stance and even the clothes they are wearing. It is therefore a POPULATE principle that an Avatar must represent the whole body of a person and not just the face. Not that the face is not important - we work closely with colleagues from UCL Medical Physics department who have expertise in recognition from video and in reconstructing faces from skulls.

It is worth reflecting that two of the biggest potential markets for IIS use - business and entertainment - also support the humanoid approach. No one expects to arrive at a virtual business meeting to be confronted by a set of weird and wonderful creations which would be more at home as Star Wars extras! And in the world of entertainment, the protagonists in computer games are most often humanoid in appearance, however fantastic the forms of their antagonists may be.

At present, humanoid Avatars are still largely idealised figures, usually bearing no credible resemblance to the person they represent. In Virtual Human research, however, humanoid models are rapidly gaining both static and dynamic realism. The most exciting new developments recently have been in hair modelling, garment flow, facial expressions, muscle simulation and gait. With the steady increase in computer graphics processing power, we can anticipate dramatic improvements in accuracy and realism by the time we have completed the POPULATE project.

REM Infographica, a leading computer model creator and supplier, will provide POPULATE with the necessary expertise in this field.

How to generate a whole body Avatar. You can do this by either snapping or scanning.

If you shoot a number of photographs - for example, eight - at 45-degree angles, you can automatically generate sprite-based Avatars from these. As a sprite-based Avatar turns, the 'flat' Avatar jumps from one image to the next. This is the technique popularised by the game Doom. However, the jump effect can be disconcerting when the whole screen is filled by part of the sprite Avatar and the Avatar jumps between images.

If money is no object, however, you can digitise the human form by using a body scanner, supplied by Cyberware in California. You can buy one from them for $400,000 or you can rent time at $2,500 per hour. But your problems are just beginning. Either way, what you will get for your money is a huge amount of raw data which will then require processing into the covenient and compact representation of an Avatar. So data capture needs to be married to efficient and effective techniques of processing which can make sense of the raw material, 'recognise' in it and extract from it a human form.

And poor Mr. Snapper, you are also having serious problems. Generating 3D, polygon-based Avatars from unregistered or registered photographs is still a research topic.

You, Mr. Scanner, however, are ultimately on better ground. Generating such Avatars from 3D whole body scans is an established technique and is accomplished by means of an automatic pipeline of algorithms. But you are not out of the woods yet. If your 3D scanner has not captured absolutely every part of the body, the scan is incomplete. You will need to employ polygon fill algorithms to create complete scans from the incomplete data. And it is quite common on existing scanners for incorrect artefacts to arise in the polygon model at, for example, places where arms are joined to the body or where complex clothing is worn. Now you will have to find a hacker to remove these artefacts by hand editing.

Is it all worth it?

Cyberware offers the most comprehensive body scanning service. But there are several other organisations in, for example, Loughborough, London, New York, Germany, and Singapore, offering 'one-off' body scanners). In addition, worldwide, there are at least 50 companies selling 3D scanning products for a wide variety of applications, and at least 100 universities currently doing 3D scanning research. 3D Scanners, recognised as one of the leaders in the world market of 3D laser scanning, will be realising the chosen whole-body Avatar capture approach for POPULATE.

POPULATE's AvatarBooth - will it fly? Consider the passport photograph. These have been a requirement for over 80 years in Europe, and passport photo booths thrive despite the market presence of 'instant' Polaroid cameras costing less than 25 ECU.

POPULATE believes that a step is needed in order to capture the reality of a person to form his or her Avatar. This step will be taken in what we have called an AvatarBooth, which will be similar to a passport photo booth. It is our belief that the specialised equipment of an AvatarBooth is required to capture the reality of a person - a reality which cannot be captured in the home.

You, Mr. Snapper, might like to know however that one commercial company already offers the service of generating a sprite-based Avatar from photographs taken by following a 'recipe' at home. Perhaps that is the AvatarBooth's competitor?

But the market parallel of passport photos demonstrates that if you need a photograph of your face, you don't take it at home, you visit a passport photo booth instead. And as we have said above, we feel that the scanning method is to be preferred over the snapping method.

So when the POPULATE project delivers its fully functional, automated AvatarBooth, Mr. Scanner, you can finally have a whole-body scan in an AvatarBooth furnished with optimal equipment. By capturing Avatars of real people in this way, the Avatar data will be extended with visual, audio and other information impossible to capture in Mr. Snapper's home or office, thus paving the way for designers of Avatar models to enhance the reality of their Avatars for IISs. This enhanced Avatar reality may best be experienced on top-end workstations but the concepts behind it can cascade quickly and effectively to low-cost PCs/NCs (Network Computers).

Kids and Grown-ups: what do the customers want? Adults: want to preserve their self-esteem. Most adults do not want to be seen by other people when they are not looking their best. This simple truth is one of the main factors limiting the popular uptake of videophones. However, once people begin to realise that they can control the conditions under which they 'sit' for their Avatar so that it can be captured when they are looking relaxed, comfortable and at their most attractive, the drawback is transformed into an asset, and this may pave the way for widespread public acceptance and adoption of Avatars and IISs.

Children: want to have fun. The current children's booth craze sweeping Japan centres around a SEGA booth which takes an electronic colour image of several schoolchildren clustered together. The children then add computer graphics effects at the booth. They take home with them several photo-quality prints which each child keeps in his or her own personal 'collectors' album. Who knows, Mr Snapper and Mr. Scanner, - one day your children may start a new craze: group Avatar thematic spaces for kids!

Standards. 3D Scanners are co-chairing the VRML Humanoid Animation Working Group. A draft humanoid avatar with animation standard was submitted to the VRML consortium in August 1997. This means that an Avatar generated in an AvatarBooth to the VRML standard can operate on any VRML 2.0 browser. Currently anyone with the latest versions of Netscape and Internet Explorer could interact with POPULATE avatars.

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