Looking Outwards-02

The Digital Human League’s Wikihuman project is an extensive collaborative effort to create realistic looking digital humans. As someone with a fine arts and theatre background and a large appreciation for Disney, the potential of digital actors both excites and frightens me. The Wikihuman project takes scans of people’s faces and then those scans are turned into various maps: diffuse, single scatter, specular, and displacement to name a few. The maps are then complied into one compound image using Autodesk’s Maya. The finished image, a head, then follows the mouse on the screen turning from side to side and looking up and down.

I don’t know how the program works, but I assume that it has to take the input from the mouse and then construct the newly exposed portion of the face. I like the potential for CGI that the Wikihumans project creates. While CGI is widely utilized in movies, the digital actor opens up new possibilities for bridging the world between animation and real life.

Link: http://gl.ict.usc.edu/Research/DigitalEmily2/