SimGraphics and Iwerks team for live animation

Long tucked away in the corner of the cultish world of virtual reality hackers, SimGraphics Engineering Corp. is stepping up its efforts to make a name for itself in the world of location-based entertainment.

Its most recent steps in that direction weren’t small. After inventing a fascinating, but incredibly complex, technology for producing what was formerly an oxymoron — i.e., “live animation” (see Vol. 1, No. 11, p. 12) — SimGraphics has inked an exclusive agreement with Iwerks Entertainment to market, sell and support the technology in entertainment venues around the world.

Splitting up VActor. SimGraphics’ original live animation project, called the Performance Animation System (PAS), made its debut at the 1992 winter CES doing MIRT — “Mario in Real Time” — at the huge Nintendo booth.

What booth visitors saw was a huge screen with a three-dimensional Mario looking directly at them, engaging them in conversation and occasionally morphing himself into various Nintendo products. “Behind the curtain,” so to speak, was PAS: an actor hooked up to a Waldo (an armature for tracking facial expressions), two joysticks, a 3D mouse and a foot pedal for eye motion, huge custom graphics databases for morphing and a powerful Silicon Graphics workstation to do the massive computations required for a live performance of high-quality graphics.

Audiences were wowed, and after MIRT’s overwhelmingly positive reception, it seemed like a good idea to find a way to make the system into a product instead of a service. A catchy new name for the system — VActor, for Virtual Actor — came about, as did a careful division of labor for the various pieces of the system.

HOW A VACTOR SYSTEM WORKS

Though most of us are familiar with computer-generated animation, and with the ability to “morph” human faces and/or objects into each other, SimGraphics is the first company that was able to drive facial animation using an operator’s actual face moments.

A VActor is the computer-generated character or object whose movements are controlled by this operator in “real time” — that is, here and now, as opposed to creating an animation then playing it back later. It is, in essence, real-time morphing; but instead of changing from a car to a tiger, or from a woman to a man, a VActor morphs between a happy face, a sad face, an expression of surprise. Though it looks less complicated because the character remains the same, it is just as much a computing challenge, especially because it is done live.

Live actors required. Operators wear specially designed devices for the face, hand and body, which allows them to control the movements and voice of computer characters at 24 to 30 frames per second. All VActors require live actors to operate, but VActors can also be used to create animation for playback in recorded animations.

(In fact, Steve Glenn, director of SimGraphics’ newly formed Entertainment Group, believes the VActor system’s greatest long-term potential is for animating characters in video games, interactive multimedia, film and TV — more on that later.)

3-way VACS. The entire SimGraphics system that’s used to develop, produce and “perform” VActors is called the VActor Animation Creation System, or VACs. It is comprised of three components.

The first, VActor Creator, will remain a service that only SimGraphics provides. A customer brings two-dimensional line art of an inanimate character to the company; it is then sent off to specialty shops that prepare massive graphical databases to SimGraphics’ specifications. These databases include a number of different morph “targets” — i.e., neutral, angry, happy, sad, surprised — and generally include mouth phonemes. SimGraphics then brings the databases back in-house and integrates them into the final VActor.

Using the term loosely. VActor Performer, which Iwerks will market, sell and support worldwide, is the standalone, $400,000 base price “mass market” (we use the term loosely) product designed for permanent installations.

A turnkey system includes Performer software, specialty input devices, audio-video equipment, a Silicon Graphics Crimson VGXT graphics computer, system setup and support. “But Iwerks still has to come to us to create the VActors,” says Glenn.

The final piece of the VActor package, still in development, is VActor Producer, which Glenn says will be used to produce high-quality animation for playback on TV, film, multimedia and video. It will provide art directors and editors the ability to truly direct animated characters, as opposed to the more tortuous task of redoing a computer-generated animation if it isn’t quite right. Obviously, Producer will include recording capability, as well as variable playback, channel editing and on- and off-line special effects.

Iwerks won’t own the market. Founded in 1986 by former Disney animator Don Iwerks, Iwerks Entertainment has built its reputation on the installation of big-screen movie productions, exhibitions and theme parks; it is now working on a new “urban movie park” called the Cinetropolis network.

According to Glenn, Iwerks will sell its VActor Performer system to entertainment installations — public venues like sports stadiums — for permanent, ongoing live-animation projects. “For example, Iwerks is in discussion with baseball and hockey teams who want to animate their mascots for display on large screens.”

But, Glenn says, “It’s not an exclusive thing.” SimGraphics has maintained the right to install temporary VActors, such as the Nintendo booth duty it did at CES.

Rentals have potential. Glenn foresees another big market for VActors in the A/V rental and production world of special events. “We’re soliciting show designers on the concept of using VActors in their businesses,” he says. “Agencies who rent out equipment and video walls could do very well providing a VActor service as well.”

One of the company’s first customers for such a service is PLS Staging in Cedar Grove, NJ, a staging and A/V equipment rental company that works with production houses and corporations on events. The scenario, according to Glenn, is that a company like PLS will buy a VActor Performer system from SimGraphics (which has become a value-added reseller for Silicon Graphics computers, as you might have imagined.) A show designer will then go to PLS and say it needs a VActor for an event. PLS will produce the show, contract with SimGraphics to produce the VActor, then lease a VActor Performer to the designer.

Glenn calls PLS “a performance partner” in this scenario. “We sell them the razor and the blades, but they can develop their own shaving business,” he says. “We’re trying to develop a worldwide network of people in the VActor business who are doing their own shows. We don’t want to be in show production and leasing equipment. We’re doing it now because we have to, but more and more we’d prefer to just sell the equipment.”

LIVE PERFORMANCE WON’T PAY THE BILLS FOREVER

Though certainly the public venues for VActors will get SimGraphics a lot of attention in the near term, Glenn says VActor Producer will probably end up being the most lucrative of SimGraphics’ products.

“We’re spending a lot of time on VActor Producer,” he says. “We’re looking for people who are developing disc-based titles who are interested in working with us, and using our system to record lots of animation for storage on a CD. Long-term, that’s the biggest market for us — not the live performance stuff, but TV, video and multimedia production using Producer.”

Denise Caruso