Your Expressions Can Be Captured In Real-Time & Rendered In-Game.

[EmmaLong]

Unity, a cross-platform game engine with a built-in IDE developed by Unity Technologies, is used to develop video games for web plugins, desktop platforms, consoles and mobile devices. It is utilized by over one million developers.

That means that anyone who finds a way to improve it is bound to profit greatly from the achievement, provided they find takers.

Advanced Micro Devices will definitely gather support just through the weight of its name alone, and Mixamo, its partner in this venture, is sure to benefit just as much.

So what did the two actually do? They developed an advanced real-time motion capture and 3D facial animation technology for the Unity engine.

Mixamo is an AMD Ventures portfolio company which provides 3D animation service for game makers.

Its Face Plus plug-in for Unity allows developers to capture their facial expressions through webcams and transfer them, in real time, onto a 3 character.

Developed for devices that support OpenCL 1.1 or newer versions, Face Plus captures motion at full camera frame rates using an AMD APU.

A system powered by an AMD A10-4600M APU was capable of up to 42 FPS captures in real-time with GPU-acceleration enabled.

That's a 13X performance improvement when compared to using CPU processing alone.

"AMD is impressed with the results Mixamo has achieved in optimizing its technology and is excited not only about the capabilities it brings to Unity developers today, but also the potential it could bring to new consumer applications," said Manju Hegde, corporate vice president, Heterogeneous Solutions at AMD.

"Thanks to incredible OpenCL performance, broad availability and the capability of AMD APU and GPU solutions across PC form factors, Unity developers can enjoy a much more streamlined development process, allowing their creativity to flow with technology so powerful it recedes into the background without interrupting the creative process."

Source : http://www.maximumpc.com/amd_mixamo_bring_real_time_facial_capture_technology_unity_developers2013

[Stonep11]

I see a huge demand for this coming from the MMO community, or at least I hope so because that's the only use for this I could really see.

[onionring]

I see a huge demand for this coming from the MMO community, or at least I hope so because that's the only use for this I could really see.

it s not because it isn t usefull that it wont be implemented everywhere, look at the kinect for exemple

[Stonep11]

it s not because it isn t usefull that it wont be implemented everywhere, look at the kinect for exemple

Could you elaborate, I don't get what you're saying?

[Beskamir]

I think Star Citizen is planning on implimenting something similar in their game as well. (For those that don't know they're using CryEngine3)

[onionring]

Could you elaborate, I don't get what you're saying?

some devs love gimminck, even if it isn t functionnal or userful, they ll implement it just for the sake of it. i m thinking about the air strike you can call from your phone in a game.

so many people will implement the emotion thing even if it doesn t help the experience in any way.

[Stonep11]

some devs love gimminck, even if it isn t functionnal or userful, they ll implement it just for the sake of it. i m thinking about the air strike you can call from your phone in a game.

so many people will implement the emotion thing even if it doesn t help the experience in any way.

I see your point and I would agree that this would almost always be implemented as a useless gimmick.  We already have HD video chat for communication, that's why I think in an MMO where you communicate with an avatar is the only use case I could see that makes any sense.

[That Norwegian Guy]

I think Star Citizen is planning on implimenting something similar in their game as well. (For those that don't know they're using CryEngine3)

 

Yep, came here to say this, and they are planning to let players use any run of the mill webcam to do it.