“the ship that’s responsible for the entire omegaverse went canon after 20 seasons on the third day of the presidential election. also putin’s stepping down”
The more lifelike computer characters become, the creepier the resemblance.
Epic’s forthcoming Unreal Engine enables game developers to create and customize lifelike character models of humans — using a software called MetaHuman Creator — lets developers fine-tune facial features, the complexion of skin, and build from preset body types, clothing, hair, and even teeth.
Some may find the MetaHuman Creator preview creepy, but even so, the uncanny valley of likeliness to real people is worth the ride.
New Unreal Engine lets you create lifelike digital humans
The sneak peek video from Unreal is not unlike another game called “Sims 4,” and enables players to customize specific points of a digital face, manipulate cheekbones or lips, or modify the nose’s shape.
You can lift or drop the eyebrows and alter the jaw’s shape and the ears’ height. Make-up is there for a reason, and even eyelash length is changeable. The program also includes a slider to manipulate the size and depth of facial wrinkles.
While much of these features are also available on “Sims 4,” the Unreal Engine breaks with its doppelgänger by enabling cloud-based storage — which means you can build realistic virtual humans directly on your browser, without the need for independent software (like a game disc, or a top-of-the-line computer processor).
Unreal Engine’s new character design pushes into the uncanny valley
Once finished, you can export your creation and download it directly into the Unreal Engine desktop app — and watch it appear self-conscious. This is because the lifelike creations come ready to animate, and work with motion capture in films, games, and a handful of other visual media.
And you don’t have to be a game developer to grasp how much time this can save. This new tech is so good at emulating the facial movements of humans that it almost slips into the uncanny valley — a perceptual phenomenon wherein humanoid robots or computer-generated faces appear so nearly identical to the real thing that you feel on the cusp of deeply disturbed by the experience.
Coming decade could change the nature of face-based identification
If this sounds like your ideal night in, Unreal Engine has made two fully-prepared character samples ready for would-be MetaHuman Creator users. The fully-loaded program is still in development, but should come out later this year.
Recent leaps forward in AI and deep-learning technology are to blame for this new realistic face modeling software, but AI is also leading to better animation of full-body movement — so subtle that a character’s lips can speak a sentence as convincingly as a real-life human’s.
Compounded by a recent graphics breakthrough — which enables developers to build CGI skin (and pores) — you wouldn’t be wrong to think the deepfakes of the coming decade could change the nature of face-based identification for keeps.
When People Are as Predictable as Water Image: Start of the 2016 Bank of America Chicago Marathon. Left panel: images after correction from perspective distortion effects. Right panel: Walking speed of the crowd, measured from a PIV analysis. Credit: Nicolas Bain and Denis Bartolo
Can we apply a physics-like reductionism to people? That’s a question we asked Simon DeDeo, a professor of social and decision sciences at Carnegie Mellon University, who also heads the Laboratory for Social Minds at the Santa Fe Institute. DeDeo was well suited to the question. With a background in astrophysics, studying galaxy formation, he’s applied a similar, mathematical approach to both contemporary and historical social phenomena (see his Nautilus feature on shifting attitudes toward violent crime, “When Theft Was Worse Than Murder”).“
One of the bugbears of the social sciences—and the study of groups and the origins and development of civilization—is this notion of human nature,” DeDeo told Nautilus editor in chief Michael Segal. “Since the very beginning of what you might call a ‘science of society,’ people have always gone back to this idea that there are some invariants of human society.” These boil down to a list of biological constants that are able to generate a diversity in human societies that somewhat mirrors galactic variety. “If you’re a physicist, you’re really proud of how little you need to assume to get where you’re going—and I think in the modern era now, in the study of society, of human behavior, we’re beginning to develop a taste for those kinds of explanations that get further with less,” DeDeo said.
It shouldn’t be a surprise, then, to hear that people, moving as a crowd, shift and jostle in ways that render them as predictable as water spilling down a channel. In a paper published in Science this month, two French scientists, Nicolas Bain and Denis Bartolo, modeled marathon runners as they walked up to the starting line of the Chicago Marathon. However, they modeled the runners not as individuals, but as part of a continuous flowing material. “Guided by the spectral properties of velocity waves, we build on conservation laws and symmetry principles to construct a predictive theory of pedestrian flows without resorting to any behavioral assumption,” the authors wrote.
As if taking a cue from DeDeo—getting further with less—Bain and Bartolo eliminated any trace of human characteristics in their model and explained human behavior with a physicist’s precision. From a practical perspective, they concluded, understanding the behavior of crowds in terms of hydrodynamics could help civic planners design more efficient and safe crowd controls.
Games take a long time to make, and a good game takes even longer. So my advice is to obviously make a game in a ridiculous amount of time, push yourself to the limits, and be as wacky and out there as ever.
Ludum Dare! It comes around 3 times a year, and this event I joined two fellow developers to create The Daily Grind, a barista simulator!
You can check out the game for free at itch.io now!
The “name one thing in this picture” picture got to me SO MUCH until I finally gave up and did a bit of googling.
From knowyourmeme: “The photo was covered by AV Club,[6] The Sun and others. On April 23rd, Redditor mcsabas posted an explanation of the picture to /r/interestingasfuck, writing "This picture is designed to give the viewer the simulated experience of having a stroke (particularly in the occipital lobe of the cerebral cortex, where visual perception occurs.) Everything looks hauntingly familiar but you just can’t quite recognize anything.”
I thought the large, dark object in the foreground was a taxidermy baby black bear originally.
Being able to knock around objects in the scene is one of the top benefits of a physics-based-animation system like this. Obstacles also naturally impede motion, so creatures getting stuck or stumbling as they push stuff around is a big bonus.
The dynamic duo is back - over a year since they first started flailing around, now they’re hooked up to a custom full-body IK solver using some crazy hacking of the FABRIK and Kabsch algorithms. In theory, this let’s them calculate their poses based on any number of desired limb positions, and determine when goals are unreachable or require repositioning.
TheLost in Space Jewelry designs feature both the black hole image made by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) last spring as well as a frame of the computer simulation of what they hoped to detect. The spherical earrings shown in the top photo are double sided with the image and simulation back-to-back, as is the pendent necklace. The smaller earrings (second photo) are mismatched and flat on the back.
TheYugen Tribe design features the same image and comes as a sliding pendant and now as black cufflinks! What could be better than black tie, black hole wear?
*We are dividing and conquering our annual American Astronomical Society winter meeting this year with Emily in situ in Honolulu and Summer holding down the social media fort in New Mexico.
