[HN Gopher] Realistic one-shot mesh-based head avatars
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       Realistic one-shot mesh-based head avatars
        
       Author : lnyan
       Score  : 135 points
       Date   : 2022-06-17 04:01 UTC (1 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (samsunglabs.github.io)
 (TXT) w3m dump (samsunglabs.github.io)
        
       | nr2x wrote:
       | Such a shame that Putin took a country with such amazing
       | technological potential down a dead end path of hydrocarbons,
       | political repression, violence, and war.
       | 
       | But hey, more world class engineers for the rest of us.
        
         | mensetmanusman wrote:
         | Good catch. Samsung just saved tens of millions of dollars
         | hiring such talent.
        
           | nr2x wrote:
           | Yeah, Russia has the brains and education to have made their
           | own Samsung...but too bad, an aging psychopath wants to
           | silence anybody with half a brain and dig in the mud for
           | "wealth".
        
       | jokethrowaway wrote:
       | Impressive work! The main cons of this seems to be unbaking
       | natural light from the texture
        
       | isuckatcoding wrote:
       | What is the real use case for this?
        
         | tristor wrote:
         | This would be useful for anyone that has specific company
         | requirements for their avatar/image as long as it can be
         | combined with something that detects the face and eliminates
         | the background
        
         | zhyder wrote:
         | I think it could be used to create a videoconferencing
         | experience akin to sitting around a table with multiple people,
         | while still selectively facing or making eye contact with
         | individuals.
        
         | [deleted]
        
         | acd wrote:
         | Video conferences. You can create a 3d world projecting 3d
         | avatars made from images from peoples web cams. Creating a 3d
         | sense of being in the same room.
         | 
         | Acting in 3d recreation of your favorite movies. If you can
         | scan faces you could play in rendered 3d recreations of movies.
         | 
         | Video games you could from a web cam image play a 3d avatar of
         | yourself in a game.
        
         | jimmySixDOF wrote:
         | It's a stepping stone towards the integration between NeRF
         | derived and DALL-E 2 CLIP diffusion type systems to create user
         | defined on demand real-time volumetric 3D digital spaces for
         | spatial computing.
        
           | sangnoir wrote:
           | Is "user defined on demand real-time volumetric 3D digital
           | spaces for spatial computing" in this instance a euphemism
           | for fanfic porn?
        
         | jokethrowaway wrote:
         | I would make a model of myself create a nice background, then
         | detect face expressions, apply them to the model and stream the
         | model while I work shirtless from a dirty basement.
        
         | swah wrote:
         | Making avatars without the 3D camera thing that phones do.
         | Could also make avatars of famous people, deceased loved
         | ones...
        
         | jayd16 wrote:
         | User avatars for games or video conferences.
         | 
         | Post fx tooling for movies. Cheaply touch up or add virtual
         | extras to a scene.
        
         | totalview wrote:
         | Easier rigged characters in video games that can be
         | personalized to a player
        
         | scoopertrooper wrote:
         | I think this could be used as a great basis for next generation
         | video conferencing. Rather than compressing raster images of
         | people speaking, we could send a model as an initial payload
         | and subsequent instructions on how to manipulate it as the
         | conversation progresses.
         | 
         | Most current networks can handle video conferencing
         | (relatively) well. However, if 8k video or something like Light
         | Field displays ever catch on, then we might end up needing
         | orders of magnitude more bandwidth to drive video conferencing,
         | so this might be an enabling technology.
        
           | ricardobeat wrote:
           | Might not be that simple. In a recent demo from Unreal Engine
           | they said that the facial animation data is the main
           | bottleneck to shipping titles with more realistic avatars.
           | Their minute-long demo took many TBs to store the motion data
           | alone.
        
             | cheschire wrote:
             | My layperson understanding makes this baffling to me. Isn't
             | motion inherently analog, and haven't we've developed high
             | performing analog compression already? Motion seems
             | significantly more amenable to lossy compression as well,
             | and I could imagine a use-case for ML-based decompression
             | to fill in between the keyframes.
        
               | dmwallin wrote:
               | You also have to consider that faces are one of the
               | things that we have the strongest perception of, with
               | lots of our neurons dedicated to the task, so when you
               | get things wrong it's far more noticeable than many other
               | bodily animations would be.
        
               | jon_richards wrote:
               | One of my favorite "weird" conjectures is that the
               | existence of the uncanny valley implies that at some
               | point it was evolutionarily advantageous for us to
               | recognize something that looked human, but wasn't... and
               | to be afraid of it.
        
               | rjeli wrote:
               | neanderthals?
        
               | giantrobot wrote:
               | Think also about face-like things we perceive because of
               | pareidolia but might in fact be dangerous. One part of
               | our brain is opportunistic about finding patterns while
               | another is a sanity check on those patterns telling us
               | not to just trust them outright.
        
               | [deleted]
        
             | HWR_14 wrote:
             | Facial animation is a real issue. This is facial mapping,
             | which is an easier to solve problem, in that throwing
             | artists at the problem is a solution.
        
           | abeppu wrote:
           | I guess, would watching an animated head avatar in 8k or a
           | Light Field display be a better experience than watching
           | lower resolution video?
           | 
           | I wonder whether the experience would be too undermined by
           | artifacts from e.g. your coworker's cat, for which the system
           | doesn't have a model, wanders into frame partway through a
           | call, and suddenly the system must dynamically either (a)
           | 'downgrade' to just video (b) be able to create a new model
           | for an arbitrary new thing on the fly (c) create some hybrid
           | of partial video data with part viewer-rendered animation or
           | (d) your coworker looks crazy interacting with something the
           | system hides from you entirely.
        
           | ekianjo wrote:
           | > Rather than compressing raster images of people speaking,
           | we could send a model as an initial payload and subsequent
           | instructions on how to manipulate it as the conversation
           | progresses.
           | 
           | What about latency though? Would that improve?
        
           | fortran77 wrote:
           | Or, at least, the faces that aren't actively speaking could
           | be replaced by avatars. It will also help keep a clean image
           | in case stuff is going on the the background, etc.
        
       | itomato wrote:
       | Very interesting to see the cross-reenactment renders.
       | 
       | In that case, I think FOMM's interpretation is more recognizable
       | but Bi-Layer David Spade, is particularly entertaining.
        
       | jmpman wrote:
       | Why is Samsung employing people in Russia?
        
         | tartsky wrote:
         | Why shouldn't they?
        
           | jokethrowaway wrote:
        
         | 0des wrote:
         | Maybe a group of people did a thing and Samsung wanted it
        
         | postsantum wrote:
         | Sir, this is not Twitter
        
         | [deleted]
        
         | kgeist wrote:
         | Strong math and programming school? OpenCV was largely
         | developed by Intel Russia, for example.
        
       ___________________________________________________________________
       (page generated 2022-06-18 23:01 UTC)