by artanim | Sep 27, 2022 | Events
Created in 2012, the Great Economy Awards aim to promote and enhance the economic sector of Geneva. They also aim to honor companies whose reputation and influence convey a positive and dynamic image of Geneva.
During the Great Economy Awards, held on September 20, 2022 at the BFM, the 2022 Geneva Economy Prize was awarded to Spineart, a pioneer in procedures and medical devices related to spine surgery. The 2022 Innovation Prize was awarded to Kugler Bimetal, which specializes in high-performance materials. The Equality Prize, created last year, was awarded to the Moser School for the measures implemented to ensure equality. Finally, the jury made up of 13 personalities from the academic and economic worlds chose to award a Special Prize to the Artanim Foundation, a leader in motion capture technologies.
These Prizes were awarded by the Geneva Chamber of Commerce, Industry and Services (CCIG), the State of Geneva and the Office of Promotion of Industries and Technologies (OPI).
by artanim | May 28, 2022 | Events, Virtual reality
Dreamscape Immersive, the virtual reality company backed by major Hollywood studios, announces the opening of its first European venue in Geneva in July 2022. Halfway between cinema and theme-park, Dreamscape offers its visitors a virtual reality experience like no other that combines the power of immersive storytelling, motion capture and virtual reality (VR) technologies.
The opening of the Dreamscape center in Geneva, in Confederation Center, is planned in two stages. The 1st of July will see the return of the Geneva 1850 VR experience. Created by Artanim and originally premiered at the Museum of Art and History in 2019 (read also here), this widely acclaimed experience has been enhanced to include new characters, new sound design, and two minutes of new content. Then, in September 2022, the center will offer two additional adventures designed by Dreamscape Immersive: Alien Zoo, as well as DreamWorks Dragons Flight Academy – which promise the thrills and magic of immersive and full-sensory storytelling.
The Geneva 1850 experience immerses visitors in the heart of the 19th century, at the time of the Fazy revolution. Visitors, welcomed by General Guillaume Henri Dufour, will have a front row seat to the upheavals that shook the City of Calvin. The story leads them from the top of the Salève mountain to the shores of Lake Geneva, passing through the alleys of the Old Town, in the Geneva of the famous Magnin relief of 1850 which served as the basis for the setting of the adventure.
Alien Zoo transports visitors to an orbiting zoo populated by all kinds of extraordinary and wonderful creatures, some of them dangerous, but all of them on the verge of extinction. Upon arrival, travelers can play with exotic and majestic creatures and join forces to narrowly escape the galaxy’s greatest predator.
DreamWorks Dragons Flight Academy has staged a rescue mission in the Dragons license universe. Aboard their flying mount, each participant will ride a dragon and soar in free flight towards the Hidden World to save the village from invaders, while trying not to set fire to their virtual world.
“Dreamscape was founded to be a place where people make lifelong memories by exploring fantastical worlds with their friends and family,” said Walter Parkes, co-founder and CEO of Dreamscape. “The genesis of Dreamscape was born in Geneva, so it’s particularly meaningful to be opening this location in the place where it all began.”
A virtual reality experience like no other
A true meeting place in the heart of Geneva, Dreamscape offers a new type of high-end entertainment. Equipped with VR equipment and motion sensors, participants are immersed in universes that push the limits of virtual reality. During the experience, they can interact with other participants, feel the wind on their skin, grab an object, move freely or even choose the appearance of their avatar.
The programming of Dreamscape in Geneva is evolving and new adventures will be offered regularly.
Caecilia Charbonnier, co-founder of Dreamscape and Artanim specifies that “after the opening of four centers in the United States and one in Dubai, we are opening the first European center in Geneva in order to get closer to our technological development, where the adventure began. This center will be our laboratory. The Geneva public will be able to test new adventures and technological innovations for the first time.”
Geneva, laboratory of innovation
The Dreamscape center in Geneva was out of a partnership between Dreamscape Immersive, ACE & Company, Opus One and Artanim. With the opening of this center, the partners aim to promote the technological and creative ecosystem of the region while offering synergies with universities and companies in the Lake Geneva region at the forefront of digital transformation.
“Dreamscape invents new worlds and new ways of telling stories. Technology is put to work for the emotions by pushing the limits of the genre and blurring the boundaries between reality and imagination. The result is truly amazing,” explains Vincent Sager, director of Opus One. “It is this approach that convinced us to embark on the adventure and to accompany Dreamscape in the opening of their first European center, here in Geneva.”
“I am personally very happy to be able to support this project and ensure that the first Dreamscape in Europe opens its doors in Geneva, which seems relevant to me for a company whose world-famous technology was invented on our shores by our local entrepreneurs.” adds Adam Said, co-founder and CEO of ACE & Company.
For more information about Dreamscape in Geneva, please consult the website: https://www.dreamscapegeneva.com
Invitation to the press
Press representatives are invited, on Monday July 4, 2022 at 10 a.m., to discover the Dreamscape center in Geneva in exclusivity. Please reserve your place until June 24, 2022 by registering by email at media@dreamscapegeneva.com. Download the media kit here.
Sponsors
Melectronics
Sunrise
Jar Capital
Partners
Infomaniak Events
Shelter
Swissroc
by artanim | Dec 17, 2021 | 3D animation, Avatar modeling, Virtual reality
Virtual avatars play a key role in many of our activities. They embody the actors in our productions, serve as reliable subjects in our machine learning efforts, or are the virtual bodies we inhabit when going on an adventure in one of our experiences. In cases where an avatar needs to represent a specific character or historical figure, the skilled work of our artists is often sufficient to create the final result.
Sometimes however we need a lot of variation. Whether this is to allow users to create avatars which more closely match their own appearance, or when creating datasets with an appropriate – and often overlooked – diversity for machine learning efforts. In such cases, the creation of tailor-made avatars is no longer feasible. It is with this in mind that we started what we call our Synthetic Factory efforts.
The basic premise of the Synthetic Factory is a simple idea. Given a neutral default character, and a set of outfits, footwear, and hair styles it can wear, can we create a set of size, shape, gender, and ethnicity changes which can be applied in real-time to create any subject we would like? The potential benefit is clear to see. Artists can simply design an outfit or a hairstyle which applies well onto a base model, and the Synthetic Factory would take care of the variations.
At the basis of the Synthetic Factory is a default avatar model. Artists can take this model and deform it to give it a certain characteristic. Whether this is a gender appropriate change in body type, a specific set of facial features, or an overall change in body size. The synthetic factory takes these inputs, as well as meta-data characterizing the “deformation”, and encodes them as blend shapes which can be applied on a weighted bases, smoothly blending between the original shape and the blend shape target. At runtime either a specific set of deformations and weights can be selected, or a set of broad characteristics can be supplied – such as “Female”, “Adult”, “Indian” for example – after which random deformations and weights are selected which are appropriate for those characteristics.
The base model (center) with 2 of its 80 blendshape.
Any assets applied on top of this model, be they outfits, footwear, hair styles and the like, need to be able to deform appropriately given any changes made to the body blend shapes. The Synthetic Factory automates this process in a pre-processing step. After applying the asset to the neutral base model, a mapping is created, encoding how the asset fits the model. Once this mapping is complete, the factory runs through all the body blend shapes, and then determines how the asset needs to deform to keep the appropriate mapping in relation to the body.
Three avatars wearing the same outfit at 3 different proportions.
These deformations are then once again stored as blend shapes, this time as a part of the asset. This precomputation happens once, and at runtime no further heavy computation is required. All assets get annotated with a set of meta-data, making sure they are only ever combined in a way matching the model’s chosen characteristics.
As a part of its run-time tools, the Synthetic Factory also enables the modification of the skeleton driving the avatar. Either through specification of exact body measurements which match a specific dataset, or by supplying an overall target height, what we call the “AvatarBuilder” will generate a new skeleton matching the requirements and applies it to the Avatar.
Combine these tools with more fine-grained randomizations such as appropriate skin tones, as well as color and texture randomizations on outfits, and from a relatively compact set of basic inputs you have the ability to generate a large variety of diverse avatars fit for any purpose. In the video below, you can see the result for 36 randomly created avatars based on gender, age and ethnicity input.
by artanim | Dec 28, 2020 | Events, Virtual reality
In November 1620, the passengers and crew of the Mayflower reached the coast of Massachusetts and established a colony there. Among them were Puritan Reformists who had crossed the ocean to found a community in accordance with their aspirations, firmly rooted in Protestant and Calvinist values. This was a founding moment for what was to become the United States of America.
Experience first-hand this poignant event and the identity to which it gave rise through a multifaceted exhibition at the International Museum of the Reformation in Geneva.
Aboard the Mayflower is one piece of this exhibition. For 5 minutes, embark in the company of the first Reformed community in America on the emblematic boat that crossed the Atlantic in 1620 – an unforgettable virtual reality experience created by Artanim.
More info
October 28th, 2020 – February 28th, 2021
International Museum of the Reformation (MIR), Rue du Cloître 4, 1204 Geneva.
Opening hours: Tuesday – Sunday from 10am to 5pm.
Free admission for visitors with an admission ticket for the permanent collection.
by artanim | Apr 26, 2020 | 3D animation
The third year of VRTogether is in full swing, and despite the recent pandemic scare our consortium is hard at work creating the technology and content for our third-year pilot. As we have described before, pilot 3 will involve an interactive scenario where users take on an active role trying to solve the mysterious murder of Elena Armova.
Pilot 1 involved a one-take interrogation scene observed by our users, and was created using three different content formats; 360 degree video, a 3D scene with billboard video, and a 3D scene with 3D characters. For this last option the actors were captured using a custom photogrammetry rig from Artanim with more than 90 cameras, after which their 3D mesh was reconstructed and subsequently rigged and animated using mocap data. The three formats allowed us to evaluate their tradeoffs in a VR context. The results indicated that in general the video billboards were preferred by users for their visual quality and natural appearance, but their main shortcoming is that user movement is very limited before such billboards no longer maintain their illusion.
Pilot 3 puts the users at the scene of the crime. Standing at and moving between different locations in Elena Armova’s apartment, they observe and interact with the characters in the scene. This, given the aforementioned shortcomings of a video billboard solution, means we will see the return of 3D characters. An additional downside of a billboard solution would have been the difficulty to have a seamless continuity of a variety of recordings. The interactivity inherent to the plot will see our characters respond to our user’s actions, wait for their response and progress along several possible paths. To seamlessly blend these various branches in our timeline, the only truly feasible option is to opt for 3D characters, driven by a full performance capture (motion capture for the full body including the fingers and face).
Having evaluated the 3D characters of Pilot 1, the consortium wanted to aim for a higher visual quality for Pilot 3. While a commercial 3D photogrammetry solution has been considered, both financial and scheduling constraints made this impractical. Luckily content creation solutions have not stopped evolving over the last few years, among which Reallusion’s Character Creator ecosystem – as well as other tools – which will be used to create our 3D characters. Characters created with the tools in this ecosystem are easily animated in real-time 3D engines such as Unity, by motion capture data from the body and hands all the way to facial animation.
Besides executing the motion capture, Artanim and its artists have taken on the task of creating our high quality virtual characters. The first step in the process is the collection of as much reference material as possible. The COVID-19 pandemic made taking in-studio headshots impossible, but some of the actors involved were already photographed as a part of pilot 1, while others supplied as much reference material as they possibly could. This includes high quality photos of their head from all angles, full body shots, as well as a set of body measurements to make sure their virtual counterparts match their own morphology. Ensuring a close match between the two also simplifies the retargeting stage while post-processing the motion capture.
Reference headshots of actor Jonathan D. Mellor who plays the character of Sarge.
Modern AI approaches have evolved quite significantly in recent years, leading to major advances in image processing in general, and obtaining 3D information from monocular views in particular. These developments find their way into content creation tools such as Character Creator’s Headshot AI plugin used as a basis for our character’s heads. Such tools do a commendable job based on a single image from a single view, but the creation of a more correct likeness still involves quite a lot of manual work, taking the generated output as a basis, carefully modifying the obtained 3D mesh to more closely match our actors’ morphologies.
The AI-generated output (left) needs significant artist intervention to get a good likeness (right), in particular for faces with asymmetrical features.
This is then followed by the addition of hair geometry, textures, shaders and materials to get a final real-time VR ready result.
After the addition of hair, textures and material setup, Sarge’s head is complete.
Without the use of 3D scans, the creation of the body is still a largely artistic process. Starting from a basic avatar body, it is up to the artist to adjust the basis to the actor’s appropriate sizes, and to adapt or model 3D clothing and accessories – including meshes, textures and materials – to get a high quality end result.
The end result is a high quality 3D representation of our actors, which can be used in interactive real-time VR scenarios for an exciting immersive experience.
