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VIEW Conference to Highlight Advances in Digital Actors

USC research professor will present Advances in Achieving Photoreal Digital Actors at the 2013 VIEW Conference.

Somewhere between Final Fantasy in 2001 and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button in 2008, digital actors crossed the “Uncanny Valley” from looking strangely synthetic to believably real.

At this year's VIEW Conference, Italy’s largest computer graphics conference, Paul Debevec, Research Professor at the University of Southern California and the Associate Director of Graphics Research at USC’s Institute for Creative Technologies where he leads the ICT Graphics Laboratory, will present Advances in Achieving Photoreal Digital Actors. The talk will be held on Thursday, October 17, at the VIEW Conference, which runs October 15-18 in Turin, Italy.

For the talk, Debevec will describe how the Light Stage scanning systems and HDRI lighting techniques developed at the USC Institute for Creative Technologies have helped create digital actors in in films such as Spider-Man 2, Superman Returns, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Avatar, Tron: Legacy, and Avengers.

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In-depth examples are to include the high-resolution face scanning, advanced character rigging, and performance-driven facial animation techniques combined to create “Digital Emily,” a collaboration with Image Metrics (now Faceware) yielding one of the first photoreal digital actors, and “Digital Ira,” a collaboration with Activision Inc., yielding the most realistic real-time digital actor to date.

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The talk will also highlight recent developments in HDRI lighting, polarization difference imaging, and skin reflectance measurement, as well as advances in autostereoscopic 3D displays, which are enabling 3D teleconferencing techniques that can transmit person’s face in 3D to make eye contact with remote collaborators.

For more information on the VIEW Conference, including the full program, visit viewconference.it.

Source: VIEW Conference

Dan Sarto's picture

Dan Sarto is Publisher and Editor-in-Chief of Animation World Network.

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