The VIEW Conference focuses on how entertainment and the arts use the same high-end tech tools. A movie engine developed for the game Crysis (above) was also used to create a virtual simulation for urban planning in Nice and Cannes. © EA.

Convergence. This word came to my mind attending the eighth edition of VIEW Conference, a festival about virtual reality that was held in Torino, Italy, from November 6 to 9. The idea is that, during the last years, different media were attracted more and more to the virtual world, driven by computer simulations and computer graphics: movies, videogames, architecture, fine arts and even marketing are now taking advantage of the same high-end technology, so that there’s not much difference now between watching a previsualization clip made for visual effects for a Hollywood blockbuster and a similar movie made to sell a municipality a new square or bridge. Another example? The videogames publisher Crytek developed a movie engine called CryENGINE 2 that was used for their new game Crysis, while the French architecture firm IMAGTP showed at the conference how they used the same engine to create a virtual simulation for urban planning in Nice and Cannes. At the same time, James Cameron is using a similar videogame engine to go with a camera inside the virtual set of his next movie, Avatar, that will be released in 2009.

Beowulf and the Uncanny Valley
One of the most intriguing talks was Parag Havaldar’s “Creating Compelling Character Animation,” about the great work behind the upcoming long-awaited Beowulf. Parag is the lead R&D engineer at Sony Imageworks, and he showed an enchanted audience the process of motion capture developed for the new Bob Zemeckis flick. The technology, called “performance capture,” is based on capturing the movements of actors’ body, face and hands, and it has been used previously on Zemeckis’ The Polar Express and Gil Kenan’s Monster House. Besides being scanned to give the visual effects technicians the data and visual reference to create the geometry of their digital figures, Angelina Jolie, Anthony Hopkins and their colleagues acted on a sound stage wearing markers, filmed by 260 Vicon cameras; the result was the motion data that were used as a backbone for their digital counterparts on screen.

Sony Imagework’s Parag Havaldar talked about the work behind Beowulf. He showed an enchanted audience the process of motion capture developed for the film. © 2007 by Paramount Pictures and Shangri-La Entertainment, LLC. All Rights Re

Listening to Havaldar’s lecture, we learned some things: although the technology has improved a lot in the last years, there’s still not any automatic motion-capture system, able to create a realistic digital character without the refinement of talented animators. The most difficult part to capture is the face and the subtlety of human expressions: Havaldar showed that for Beowulf all the possible expressions were created starting from 64 basic poses of the Facial Action Coding System developed by scientists Paul Ekman and Wallace Friesen; watching the results on screen, we can say that hardware and software have improved a lot since The Polar Express, giving the characters a more human-like appearance. Even the “zombie effect” that afflicted Tom Hank’s character in that movie has been corrected, thanks to an advanced use of electrooculography to capture eye movements.

Yet despit thel efforts made by Havaldar and his team to achieve realistic characters, watching a short clip where Angelina Jolie as the mother of Grendel promises eternal glory to Ray Winston’s virtual muscular Beowulf, there were some moments when I had a strange feeling of uneasiness. So I appreciated a lot the next lecture by Peter Plantec, a journalist, artist, and long-time contributor to VFXWorld, about “The Art of Crossing the Uncanny Valley.” Basically he explained that the more a virtual character pretends to be real, the more we look for flaws, because the subconscious part of our brain automatically wants to protect us from lies, and sends us a continuous and deep message of danger that brings us to the Uncanny Valley, where we can feel only repulsion for the character. In Peter’s opinion, this will change in the future, when we’ll be more accustomed to virtual humans. But to achieve a result that avoids this feeling of discomfort, he explained that three things are needed: psychology, because people creating these digital characters have to understand human perception; artistry, because motion capture must be tweaked by animators; and a further improvement in the technology to capture even the most subtle expression and detail.

Virtual Sets, Concept Illustrations and a Glimpse of Avatar
Another very interesting meeting took place on November 8 with Tino Schaedler, a German architect who worked as digital set designer on movies such as Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, V for Vendetta and the upcoming The Golden Compass. In a world where technology develops very rapidly, the old generation of production designers very often feels uncomfortable using digital tools, so Tino works to help them achieve their vision through the use of computer graphics. More and more art directors and production designers are relying on animation software to create total virtual environments for their movies or to craft digital models in order to build the real sets, and Tino usually works producing previs movies like the one that was used by Tim Burton to visualize the scene in Chocolate Factory where the candy boat floats on the chocolate river inside the tunnel.