| Highlights for January 2024
Entertainment Context VRChat’s newly launched “Impostors” feature enhances cross-platform compatibility by allowing mobile users to view avatars resembling those used by PC users. This development improves inclusivity and fidelity in virtual social environments by ensuring more consistent avatar representations across devices. In gaming, the 2022 first-person shooter High on Life stood out for its use of highly expressive and animated weapons known as Gatlians. The game’s characters gained personality through advanced facial animation provided by Speech Graphics, a company specializing in expressive speech-driven animation. Epic Games is furthering the field of virtual humans by hiring a Senior Director of Engineering for its MetaHuman team in London, focusing on the development of MetaHuman Creator and Animator tools. These products are central to the creation of realistic and animatable digital humans for real-time applications, particularly in gaming and interactive media. Education Context Zhejiang University of Finance and Economics introduced a digital human to teach its E-Commerce course. This virtual instructor, integrated into the curriculum, demonstrates the application of digital humans in academic settings, aiming to modernize the learning experience. Loughborough University in the UK is exploring the educational potential of holographic technology, enabling remote guest lecturers to appear as lifelike holograms. This approach enhances the presence and engagement of remote speakers, bordering on the functional use of virtual beings in educational delivery. Another significant example is the adoption of AI-powered chatbot storytellers in Holocaust education, which are being used to replicate the narratives traditionally shared by human historians. These virtual characters aim to preserve and convey sensitive historical content with consistency and accessibility. Marketing and Personal Development Eva is a digital human created by Nicolás Campos, a second-year international student at Miami Dade College’s Wolfson Campus. Eva represents an experimental personal project that reflects broader trends in self-initiated digital human creation for branding, storytelling, and education. The project demonstrates how individual creators, rather than corporations alone, are now building functional synthetic characters for diverse use cases, including portfolio development and experimental narrative interaction. Enterprise and Surveillance Context Italian surveillance firm Cy4gate offers a virtual avatar software suite designed for law enforcement monitoring of social media. This tool enables analysts to engage in online spaces using realistic avatars, facilitating undercover operations and behavioral monitoring. The use of virtual avatars in such contexts raises questions of ethics and oversight, especially when deployed in public digital environments. Cultural and Identity Context A post from 28 January 2024 discusses how individuals increasingly operate as digital avatars within online spaces. By curating and projecting highly constructed digital personas, users bridge the gap between their physical and virtual selves. This practice aligns with the broader evolution of avatars as personalized, persistent identity vehicles that can serve social, professional, or entertainment purposes. It reflects the normalization of avatar-based self-expression as part of digital identity construction. Technology and Tools DiffPortrait3D is a technology that generates photo-realistic, 3D-consistent images of faces from a single 2D portrait. This system enhances avatar creation by offering accessible tools for realistic facial modeling, supporting applications in gaming, simulation, virtual humans, and digital twins. By simplifying the process of generating lifelike facial geometry, DiffPortrait3D supports the scalability of virtual human creation across industries. |
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