The next generation of the Xbox avatar may be a photo-real avatar that looks just like you and which you can animate with words and emotion.
Microsoft showed software at Techfest Tuesday that animates a 3-D photo avatar. After capturing a 20-minute video of someone talking, the software can render the animated photo image. You can type words for the avatar to speak, or make the avatar show joy, anger, fear or surprise.
The image does not have hair, as Microsoft researchers are still struggling to replicate the movement of real hair.
"It has a lot of potential in telepresence, gaming, social networking, shopping and makeup," said Lijuan Wang, a researcher at Microsoft Research Asia in Beijing. "In the future we can put makeup on the face."
Microsoft is getting ready to release Avatar Kinect on Xbox Live so players can interact with each other virtually with their Xbox Avatars, cartoon versions of themselves that players create.
Peter Lee, managing director of Microsoft Research Redmond, said making an avatar look real is tricky business. "If you try to make it more expressive you start to get into the uncanny valley like 'Polar Express,' " he said, referencing the computer-animated film.
Microsoft Techfest continues today and Thursday for employees at the Redmond campus. The company expects 5,000 to 7,000 employees will visit the fair to show off what scientists in Microsoft Research are working on.
The 3-D animated head is similar to a demonstration I saw from Japanese wireless carrier NTT DoCoMo at Mobile World Congress. That technology used a photo and then animated it with words and emotions. The animations had hair. Here is a video of the DoCoMo technology I captured at Mobile World Congress in February in Barcelona.
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