The net result is a system that recognizes your movements and allows you to interact with virtual objects using the sophisticated physics of Valve’s engine, as the embedded video demonstrates. Don’t miss the bit at 0:30 where John, in the person of a giant robomechanical avatar, kicks a pile of virtual bodies across the screen.
The first time I saw this video from Daniel Larsson and Tomas Redigh I was skeptical that they had really animated it by hand, just by moving a bunch of coins around on the floor. Then I saw the clever trick they were using to lay out the individual frames. Still a tedious task, requiring serious commitment.
And although it remains to be seen if XtraNormal’s business model is going to survive the rising groundswell of interest in the technology, the advent of their ubiquitous text-to-movie software lifts the very last remaining entry barrier to indie movie-makers, which is itself a significant milestone. There can be little doubt we’re going to see a huge explosion of these robo-cartoons in the near future, and correspondingly rapid improvements in the emotive abilities of the speech synthesizers. I’m curious, too, about what the new noun is going to be/already is. Has anybody heard it yet? [Thanks, Maya!]
In response to our DIY Movie Making theme, John Martin, of Reallusion, makers of the machinima/animation software iClone, sent us this adorable piece he did using the software he and his brother James developed. As he put it in email: “iClone and a crew of two. No render farm. No team. No limits, with an […]
