Complete video at: fora.tv Markus Gross, Director of Disney Research Zurich, demonstrates the new technology Disney is using to animate the intricacies of facial expressions. The slightest deviation from natural-looking facial motion, he says, creates the “uncanny valley effect,” making the face look “really weird and odd.” —– Disney computer scientists working at the ETH Zurich are creating the entertainment technologies of tomorrow, from hyper-realistic facial modeling to video retargeting and 3-D animation. The future of entertainment is here. Well, it’s in Zurich, Switzerland, anyway. Everyone knows The Walt Disney Company’s famous mouse, Mickey. Most also know Disney-Pixar characters like Nemo, Mr. Incredible, and Wall-E. But perhaps Disney’s most fascinating players are the ones working behind the scenes on the entertainment technologies of tomorrow—scientists like those at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETH Zurich), where Disney established a research laboratory 18 months ago called Disney Research Zurich, inaugurated at the end of April, 2010. In honor of the unique partnership, swissnex San Francisco and the Greater Zurich Area welcome two of the main researchers involved. Markus Gross, Disney Research Zurich’s director and head of the computer graphics laboratory at ETH Zurich, explains the novel relationship between Disney and ETH as well as some of the results already coming out of the collaboration. For example, the video retargeting …
carbonseven1st says
i thought that disney was dead!?
marsCubed says
Fascinating stuff..
one can imagine neural networks being employed at some point, to give the musculature realistic actions, these would learn ’emotional’ responses from stimuli?
micro gestures provide many of the most important clues about the other’s meaning.
Perhaps skin meshes will one day need to have specific ‘upbringing’ algorithms to react in the required way.
Such things are already used on some skeletal rigs.
A cartoon face that tells a story, may actually mean it one day.
RadarKat73080 says
Explains Michael Eisner. When he worked for Disney he was almost life-like.
666norton420 says
@carbonseven1st walt is, the corporation is still going strong though….
;d
jeremybirn says
Title is mis-leading: Disney Feature Animation isn’t actually using mocap. The faces are animated by animators.