Andrew MacDonald

Expeditions into the uncanny valley. Andrew will be discussing the DDH pipeline developed by cream and SIRT. Cream Digital as a small IDM production lab spun out of Cream productions we were looking to build VR interactive experiences that modeled the formula Cream has been following for years producing in adventure TV. (Wild Things, Survivorman, Weapon Hunter) These shows rely on celebrity hosted adventures. The key thing with the promise of celebrity in VR is the virtual characters need to be as authentic as possible. We soon learned that producing accurate 3D digital doubles of real people is extremely challenging and expensive endeavor and then maintaining a high degree of likeness and fidelity when you need to optimise said characters for platforms like the oculus quest... it becomes next to impossible. This is when we decided to test out a concept of baking video as texture back onto a model and began a 3 year applied research project at SIRT. In this talk we will demonstrate the results discuss how this approach is a cost effective solution and more broadly where accessible digital doubles and avatar technology is headed.