Comparison: How realistic Avatars can look like?
Here is a comparison between virtual world avatars and how realistic they can be. Generally it is easier to make cartoon-like and harder to make photorealistic. Commercial games and many closed virtual worlds are not included. Barack Obama is used as an example as he is widely known.
Wikipedia says that an avatar is “a deliberate descent from higher spiritual realms to lower realms of existence for special purposes”. When I go from my reality to the artificial digital reality, I present myself as an avatar.
Some want to use fantasy avatars, some want to look like they are in the real life. If you don’t want to look like you are, it is easier. Photorealism is the hardest because human eye is most trained for that and easily senses any deviations.
Realistic-looking avatar is especially important for virtual meetings and business purposes.
Second Life avatar
SL Avatar is based on a mesh and skeleton, the modifiability is achieved using morph targets. The SL Avatar has respectable 144 modifiable parameters. See here how you can export and import SL avatar settings to/from your own computer.
Second Life girl caLLie cLine was the first Avatar that was selected to the “Top 100 Hottest Females of 2007″ in Maxim. The avatar model can’t be too bad!
Opensim users usually technically use Second Life avatar if they are using SL Viewers. This has worried some people as the licensing of the avatar model is unclear. There is an effort that has started to create universal free human avatar models that could be used also in Opensim, Tommi Laukkanen wrote about it here.
Barack Obama in Second Life
Second Life avatar is cartoon-like with exaggerated muscles and forms – although this is something everyone can adjust themselves.
Olive avatar
Forterra’s “flagship product, OLIVE™ (On-Line Interactive Virtual Environment) is an open, distributed client-server platform for building private, realistic virtual worlds.” – excerpt from Forterra web site.
Barack Obama avatar in Olive
Olive avatar is even more cartoon-like than Second Life avatar. Also, the rendering quality of Olive is optimized for low-end hardware because of the wide user base at US government projects.
Wonderland avatar
Sun Microsystem’s project wonderland is working to enhance their avatars. The next release is coming and there should be something better available at that time. Take a look how you can try out Wonderland, it is really easy.
Avatar in Wonderland 0.4
Wonderland’s current avatar model is really simple and low polygon. According to their web pages there are significant improvements coming. I hope that Wonderland project joins to define universal avatars.
realXtend avatar
realXtend avatar can use Facegen’s photofit feature to make surprisingly real looking models. It is also possible to use any 3D mesh as an avatar, some examples being shipped with realXtend are a snowman and a mushroom.
Barack Obama's avatar in realXtend
realXtend avatar can be made to look cartoonish, too as is the case with Rex Ping. Avatar has more than 10k polygons and it has both morph target based modifications as well as individual bones can be scretched in the skeleton – which can lead to many very funny avatars, see video below.
While realXtend avatar clearly looks realistic, realXtend is still an early phase software. As an interesting note, Ludocraft hinted at realXtend mailing list that they are working to bring face tracking and facial animation to realXtend.
If you have screenshots of an avatar in other virtual world platforms (Barack Obama would be good!), please send them to me (jpirkola@gmail.com) with some explanation and I will publish them as a continuation to this post.
OpenSim, Uncategorized, realXtend, wonderland
Hey Jani …
Thanks for your Avatar comparison. I really like the graphic quality of realXtend. From an animation movie and robot technologie viewpoint there is an effect known as the “uncanny valley” (see Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_valley) and it is to question if a more realistic Avatar is a “trustworthy” Avatar. I for myself prefer the good graphics of realXtend Avatars for the creation of fictive characters like in old animation movies, where you can show inner motivations outside. Thanks for the cybertechnews. Asander
Hi Jani,
Avatar quality is something we’ve been focused on for the Evolver character engine since our start in 2004. On the consumer engagement side, Evolver delivers an avatar creation experience which includes a clone from photograph featue (I sent you an Obama screenshot a few minutes ago) and is suitable for even pre-teen users.
On the Avatar transportation side, we deliver characters in 4 poly counts, 9 different skeletons (more each week), one size fits all clothing, completely automatic character rig for face and body, normal, spec and transparency maps, and to date, 7 or 8 different formats. That enables us to do fast integrations for those clients who wish to license the Evolver character generator for their world and those who simply want to integrate with us to help generate traffic to their site.
The Browser only based version goes live on Evolver.com on June 1.
We are also keenly focused on real time motion capture’s abilty to stun participants in 3D immersive experiences since it so squarely plays on one of our strengths – our high quality automatic face animation rig. Stay tuned for more details!
Best,
Brian
I don’t know whether it is deliberate but your depiction of Obama as an SL avatar is not up with the current state of play in Second Life.
1. You can do actual face modelling/shape for rl to sl insertion.
2. Photorealistic skins, both custom and off the shelf, have been avaiable for some time.
3. Realistic muscle modelling is available as also is drape clothing.
4. Whoever created the SL Obama avatar had little idea of the shape/facial feature/ skin modelling.
5. Your viewer, of course, from which the picture was taken might not have been up to scratch.
Cheers Johnnie Wendt
Even if avatars look fantastic, they won’t feel real until they behave like real humans. We’re still far from there.
Fortunately the solution is around the corner. Feeling Software unveiled last week a solution called FaceFlow. It enables users of virtual worlds and games to reproject complex emotions by simply acting naturally in front of a standard web camera. No other special hardware or markers are required. A demonstration and more technical details are available here:
http://www.feelingsoftware.com/content/view/120/270/lang,en/
Christian
I selected SL Obama because it was part of the idea to have same character on different platforms. If someone could send me a better version of Obama in SL, I am happy to write another post and include screenshot there – I am already planning that because I got a screenshot from Evolver’s Obama – and it looks stunning…
If you really want to do a true comparison, you need to control the comparison environments and truly seek out the “best” each has to offer. Johnnie Wendt was dead on, when he said “…your depiction of Obama as an SL avatar is not up with the current state of play in Second Life.”
Rather than asking for examples of “Obama,” (more transparent/useless partisan fanaticism/deification) why don’t you simply ask experts in each environment to create the most realistic male and female avatars and let your readers judge which look “best.” You want to evaluate images that contain hair and skin tones that offer the creators more opportunity to show off all that their environment of choice can do.
Controlling the HW used for testing is also required. The image I can produce on machine with a $800 graphics card is going to be far superior than that produced on a typical desktop or laptop. To make the contest “fair,” each submission should be judged by viewing it on the same computer, using each environment’s default video settings for the systems particular hardware.
I think the subject of comparative platform realism is worthy of ongoing debate, but this needs to be done in a far more objective way. I look forward to a much more “realistic” post from you on the subject in the near future!
One of our clients, CyberExtruder, offers a face creation service in Second Life. Available at Avatar Island, the service uses a single photo to automatically create a face texture. Using the service will provide a significantly improved look over the example provided.
Thank you everyone! Great comments and feedback. I think we should set up an avatar beauty contest – feel free to send me privately suggestions how that should be done (jpirkola@gmail.com). Do we choose one RL model that we try to recreate? If so, who? Madonna?
As we can see there are already a number of solutions to create, drive, generate very high quality expressive avatars, the industry knows about these solution providers and their users generally seem to want the benefits they can offer. All that remains is for them to be actually implemented (and by implication for them to be budgeted for).
That is the best of all (virtual) worlds, the worst is if platform developers take the game business route and try and build all of these technologies themselves (the not invented here syndrome). That will cost them a fortune and delay the introduction of these features for years, a frustration for their customers when they finally receive inferior solutions.
Many Platform developers also need to fundamentally reorient and reprioritize their worlds to understand that the single most important part of their world is the expressive avatar, not the world. Beautiful worlds with low resolution avatars makes little sense for most applications.
At Emotion AI we also have a solution for super high quality expressive avatar control so you know where my bias lies.
Look, it’s a fantasy world. Are you sure you want to look like you? Or even human?
Theres a lot of latitude out there, and I’m thinking you’re focusing too much on realism in a fantasy world.
I totally disagree with Ian, as I could care less about expressive avatars. They usually have little to say.
My SL avie is much better looking than that chick in Maxim unfortunately the RL human operator probably leaves alot to be desired…
I don’t agree that realistic avatars are required for virtual meetings and business purposes. They’re certainly completely unnecessary for entertainment or consumer purposes, but even for business meetings, it’s more important that the avatar function effectively as a tool for emotional and intellectual expression than as a faithful representation of a real human being. It’s arguable that exaggerated features actually function better. Their expressions are certainly more readable when you don’t have close-up cameras. They’re also visually appealing and emotionally engaging, largely because they avoid the uncanny valley effect that Asander Graves recognized in the first post. And they don’t have to be funny to look at – that’s a matter of art direction. Makers of animated films are well aware of this – look at the art direction of human Pixar characters, for example – and they have millions of polys to work with. If you’re designing a virtual world that includes physics, even a little environmental layout, vehicles, water – even 10K polys per avatar is a stretch to render on common PC hardware: imagine a virtual conference with 250 avatar attendees. And with the movement toward cloud computing, you have to wonder if “nettops” will spread and have an effect on the poly budgets you have to work with – nettops don’t come with boatloads of memory and fancy video cards.
The bottom line is that I don’t think there’s any reason to assume that realistic avatars are a requirement for any application, and certainly not if they require too many polys to make it impractical to render large numbers of avatars within the view frustrum without a radical drop in frame rate. There are too many cases where the usual tricks – culling, LODing – are in oppposition to the point of having all those avatars in the first place.
It is well known that there is only one Virtual Obama and he is right there:
http://img25.imageshack.us/img25/8454/nato09b.jpg
and there:
http://img25.imageshack.us/img25/6561/giftm.jpg
and there:
http://img25.imageshack.us/img25/2425/insolvency.jpg
and there again:
http://www.agoravox.com/auteur.php3?id_auteur=5417