� The Real Quad A | Main | Steve Butler, Dispersed �
October 31, 2004
Digital Me, Video Mods
It has been a while since I first created a digital self with the character creator in Tony Hawk Underground. Since then, I've been to Second Life and There to create online avatars. I've also built several for regular games including Morrowind, KOTOR and others. So far, it has been the Tony Hawk engine that has done the most accurate me.
I believe that this kind of thing could be standardized and that we should all have a library of digital avatars to represent us in different games. You could have a superhero you, an avarage you, an evil you, a sexy you, etc, all stored in your home digital library. You could have a skin and skeleton studio and build up multiple copies and save to a number of formats appopriate to the games you play until such time that there was one universal standard - like True Type fonts. Clearly the technology for avatar creation is in place. What's not is the home version, nor the cross platform standards.
What struck me the other day was this could be the entertainment that replaces a number of lower tech implementations. The spark for this was the MTV2 show 'Video Mods'. It's nice and primative at the moment - but I can see a commodity ready for desktop in a couple years. The concept? Amateur motion capture.
There are a number of ways this can be done. The simplest might be something along the lines of a pseudo-dynamic cel shading effect done with a filter of a digital video taken with a consumer DV camera. Think of the characters in the film 'Waking Life'. Another method might be to grab several seconds of cheaply done motion capture and insert your avatar into your favorite music video. But there are a lot of interesting kinds of things that might emerge from this direction.
Posted by mbowen at October 31, 2004 10:23 AM
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