Technabob » siggraph

Virtual Insects Crawl on Real Hands

Technabob — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 12:08:58 +0000

Spotted at SIGGRAPH 2010, this interactive art display might just look like a pile of sand, but stick your hands in it, and a variety of creepy crawly insects come to life.

Thankfully, these nasty many-legged creatures aren’t real. In fact, they’re digitally-projected images. Glowing Pathfinder Bugs was created by Anthony Rowe and Squidsoup. The interactive display lets you manipulate the sand to unearth insect colonies, then let a virtual bug crawl into your hand. it’ll follow your movements once you pick one up.

Here’s a video clip showing off the little glowing buggers in action:

Click to View Embedded Video Clip

Weird. Cool, but weird.

[via Core77]

Image Metrics Emily Cg Facial Animation Blows My Mind

Technabob — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 11:40:28 +0000

The other day, I showed you guys what I thought was some really impressive computer generated facial animation. Then, the guys over at Image Metrics sent me a video clip of their latest CG creation, Emily, and I was bowled over.

Emily is a truly monumental achievement, recreating every nuance of human facial expression, even though what you’re actually looking at is the face of a digital actor. Created through a partnership with USC’s Institute for Creative Technologies (ICT), the team’s primary objective was to create a completely convincing, animated computer-generated face, and I think they succeeded.

Using ICT’s special scanning system that can capture facial details down to the individual pore, the face of actress Emily O’Brien was transformed into a digital representation of herself, which could then be entirely machine-manipulated. A special spherical lighting rig captured O’Brien in 35 reference facial poses using a pair of high resolution digital cameras. The facial maps were then converted into 3D data using Image Metrics’ proprietary markerless motion capture technology.

Image Metrics then generated a new animation sequence and precisely superimposed it onto the live actress’ head. As you can see from the video below, you’d be really hard-pressed to tell the difference between digital Emily and real-world Emily.

Click to View Embedded Video Clip

Amazing, no? Be sure to check out some of Image Metrics’ other CGI projects, which include work on Grand Theft Auto IV, Devil May Cry 4, and a most excellent Gnarls Barkley video featuring a anthropomorphic singing heart.

Holographic Display Shows 360-Degree Digital Images

Technabob — Mon, 27 Aug 2007 18:02:41 +0000

At the recent SIGGRAPH 2007 conference, a team of engineers from USC showed off a display system that’s capable of projecting interactive 360-degree viewable images produced by a computer.

By using a high-speed video projector, a spinning platform with a holographic diffuser and special decoding hardware, the display can crank out up to 5,000 real-time images per second. Once the display spins up to speed, it creates a fully 3D image that you can walk all the way around.

Click to View Embedded Video Clip

While I’m not sure that you’d want to get hit by this thing when it’s zipping around at full speed, the end result is pretty spectacular. As a matter of fact, the technology was the recipient of this SIGGRAPH’s Best Emerging Technology award for 2007.

[CGSociety via Geekologie]