THE HUMANIZATION
OF LARA CROFT
Copyright 2001 www.tombraiderchronicles.com
[ September 10th 2001 ]
New pioneering
research into the humanization of digital characters
has resulted in a United States patent for a "method
and system for scripting interactive animated
actions" being awarded to two U.S. professors,
the New York Times reports today.
Professor
Kenneth Perlin, director of the Media Research
Laboratory at New York University and Athomas
Goldberg, founder and chief technology officer
of Improv Technologies based in Manhattan, are
developing new skin technologies aimed at improving
the texture quality and realism of human movement
within animation based on Perlin's vision of the
future which awards video-game heroines the psychological
complexity of Emma Bovary, the nuanced physicality
of Juliette Boniche and the social cunning of
Alice Roosevelt.
Accredited
for his part in the 1982 sci-fi movie Tron - which
depicts the digital incarceration of a hacker
into a computer generated environment - Professor
Perlin began to study the physics of computer
animated movement within video-games. "You don't
need to duplicate the physics of how people move
in order to stimulate human movement, Perlin says,
"You can use the same visual fake-out for simulating
human movement that you use for surface textures
- by stimulating the visual patterns that a human
brain sees when it perceives movement."
Professor
Perlin concluded that computer games needed more
realistic actors, branding the worst B-movie actors
better performers than their current digital video-game
counterparts. Animation was therefore disassembled
into smaller fragments in order to capture more
fluid motion, an idea that led to an initial patent
that "covered the basic notion of an animated
character whose actions consisted of discrete,
individual movements, each of which could be layered
onto another in a large variety of combinations."
By manipulating
the textures of movement, Perlin and Goldberg
were able to create an intelligent character that
would perform on an individual basis within a
programmed environment. A series of pre-defined
layers applied to a skeleton would therefore award
the digital actor a consistent identity that would
remain familiar throughout an adventure, irrespective
of environment and without the risk of predictability.
"Using
traditional techniques, " Goldberg said, "one
needs 100 separate animations to have five minutes
worth of animation that doesn't repeat itself.
Using our techniques, I can create 10 different
layers of animation, each of which is three seconds
long, and I'll end up with a billion potential
animations. Even with a very little bit of work
you can create this behavior that is never repetitive
and that never recycles."
Using
Core Designs adventure Lara Croft as an example,
Perlin's technology can apply humanization techniques
that would afford the British aristocrat "many
discrete choices that are all in keeping with
her personality but are nonetheless quirky and
unpredictable enough to create the illusion that
she is making interesting decisions on her own."
Henry
Jenkins, director of media studies at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, says Perlin's and Goldberg's
pioneering work "really points to how we can have
technical tools to expand the vocabulary of emotions
that game designers have to work with."
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