Most of us are familiar with Avatars in some form. The older generation, in the form of those Blue creatures, while the youngsters are more familiar with the little versions of themselves next to their names on Snapchat. Well, Oppo is going a step further building on the digital versions of ourselves, by creating dynamic, advanced avatars using a propriety AI model to give a digital life with unlimited possibilities.
No longer limited by your aching joints and social anxiety, these avatars can dance away to no end, or live a life you are too weighed down to do yourself (kind of like the Sims). So how does it work? You need to enter the Oppo Digital Avatar Lab, where a few Oppo Find X5 Pro smartphones collect data about the human body. After adequate data has been collected and the recording is finished, the AI automatically generates the 3D human model by analyzing RGB videos. This eliminates the reconstruction errors of traditional methods.
In order to render a more realistic visual effect that supports animation, Oppo has anchored the motions of a professional dancer’s skeleton as pre-defined nodes in order to construct paths or a set of structured local radiance fields. These local radiance fields represent the shape and appearance in the local space around its corresponding node to factorize cloth deformations into skeleton motions. This process allows for a more realistic, complex depiction of clothes through movements. The process enables the avatar can learn different dance moves according to body poses. In the future, we can expect the model to support more scenarios, leading to various interactive experiences. For now, though, none of this is coming to your Oppo smartphone so it’s just a work in progress for many things to come.
This new Human Avatar Modeling provides an automatic generation of a 3D, 1:1 digital avatar. Much like Snapchat’s AI advancements, Oppo wants to leverage the technology in the future for things like virtual clothes fitting, AI fitness instruction and the creation of lifelike avatars in VR/AR worlds.
Best of all, it will aid game developers can build more realistic, convincing characters and animations (unlike the females of Vice City) with only one body template.