Pose Animator: SVG animation tool using real-time TensorFlow.js models
github.com
github.com
https://www.newyorker.com/contributors
How interesting would it be to have your own live emotionally expressive avatar for videoconferencing, when you don't want to worry about your hair, makeup, lighting, or general visual state at all?
"The proposed solution to what the telecommunications industry's psychological consultants termed Video-Physiognmoic Dsyphoria (or VPD) was, of course, the advent of High-Definition Masking. Mask-wise, the initial option of High-Definition Photographic Imaging — i.e. taking the most flattering elements of a variety of flattering multi-angle photos of a given phone-consumer and‚ thanks to existing image-configuration equipment already pioneered by the cosmetics and law-enforcement industries — combining them into a wildly attractive high-def broadcastable composite of a face wearing an earnest, slightly overintense expression of complete attention."
Always thought it was fascinating that he came up with this in 1996!
We had a large, flip-disc (or dot) wall at the site in Macau in 2012 that we purchased from a company that was a wall of black and white discs or dots that would flip to create a cool effect by tracking people in front of the wall with Kinect units in real time. It also made a cool clicky sound like old train/airport physical arrival/departure boards did.
I had a feature on my HTC phone or early Skype over 10 years ago where a cartoon cat mimicked my mouth, eyes, and head movement live on camera, which I can't find the reference to, but I have a screen recording of it when talking with my kids in the US from Macau.
I also remember using animata, a software that animated 2D puppet-like cut-outs to the music, I played with over 7 years or so ago, that was really cool [1 YouTube].
They won an Emmy for it this year, their post about it (https://theblog.adobe.com/adobe-character-animator-receives-...) notes that it was used for a live broadcast of the Simpsons, and a Showtime series called "Our Cartoon President" (https://www.sho.com/our-cartoon-president).
Blender. Performance capture is used just like it is in computer games but the 3D objects are shaded differently to give them a more 2D look.
I am currently using a little setup that uses OpenCV to acquire frames from the real camera, TensorFlow/BodyPix to compute an alpha mask for the foreground (me) and then OpenCV again to transform and composite myself behind news desks and into car infotainment screens and the like, eventually writing it to a virtual webcam I can use from Zoom (over its own virt bg feature this adds the layering and perspective transforms), Jitsi, Teams, etc.
The above looks like another fun thing to add. Time to go full Who Framed Roger Rabbit? ...
Does that indicate the author is a Google employee who happened to make this in their free time, and has to say this somewhere by Google policy?
This is actually a great idea
So the explanation may be that it is useless input but believe me it is not useless to the author to have people congratulate them for the fruit of their labor. It's a human desire to be recognized by others. How is it not a positive comment? Why down-vote something as benign and empathic as saying congratulations? So force a comment on each down-vote and things might get a little bit better because at least we'll know it's not just random acts of hostility and that the down-voter has a rational reason for it, at least in their mind.
One reason that guideline exists is that unfair downvotes frequently get canceled by users who come along, see the situation, and make a corrective upvote. Meanwhile complaints like this linger on in the thread, inaccurate and off-topic—they don't garbage-collect themselves. As an example, I noticed your other comment and upvoted it before I saw this comment here. Similarly, other users have upvoted the GP.
As with any stochastic process, there is a lot of error and spillage with downvotes. There's no way to perfect it; you have to ask whether the system is better off with it than without it. Forcing comments wouldn't help, and posting complaints certainly doesn't help.
Yesterday (you can look in my comment history) I ran into a situation where the person doing the down-voting turned out to be basing it on their opinion not fact (after they finally stated their opinion on the matter, which contradicts peer-reviewed research on the topic, I realized why they were down voting: insufficient depth of understanding of the topic) and no one came after them to correct the situation...
Either have people explain why they down-voted or have a Talk page where people can discuss their reasons, complain, etc, behind the scene.
Edit: and it's for similar reasons that we don't publish a moderation log.
The demo is very promising, though.
Need some South Park vector models!
I studied linguistics and CS in school, and I learned a little JSL to speak with deaf friends in Japan. I think sign language processing is a really neat combination of computer vision/graphics and linguistics. Lately there have been so many great advances in speech processing, but there hasn't been a huge leap forward for sign language processing, though I feel there should be.
Deaf people are already really disadvantaged in many places, and getting left behind technologically doesn't help. I really resented looking for JSL books in the "disabled" section of the book stores in Japan, and when I spoke with some people about JSL, they didn't believe it was its own language. Even just linguistic work for sign languages is limited; I haven't seen a single reference grammar (re: comprehensive documentation) on any sign language. I think the difficulty of working with sign language data makes it more daunting to work with. (Paucity of speakers is certainly not a deterrent for linguists.)
But I guess since "modern" illustrations are quite minimal, said work probably shouldn't take too long.
The limiting factor for accuracy in a lot of these technologies is the actual rigging process of the characters, probably because that is very difficult to standardize or generalize across different geometries, art styles, animation drivers, 2D vs 3D, etc.