Comments on: SOE want to animate your face/voice into your avatar

By: Sylow

Sylow — Mon, 04 Jun 2012 16:49:58 +0000

Then just wait for the next step of the system, where the armour of your characters is adjusted to what the camera sees. Along comes the tank in his fine-serrate shirt…

By: Sylow

Sylow — Mon, 04 Jun 2012 12:27:16 +0000

Despite my dislike of TOR, you very much express my thoughts on the topic. When my character needs to be a stone-faced diplomat, i personally might still stare at the screen in a hateful manner and while when some action of somebody actually amuses me a lot, my character would be about to do some hateful kicking. The broad smile on his face would just not be matching.

By: nuggettygoodness

nuggettygoodness — Mon, 04 Jun 2012 09:44:49 +0000

Raids are going to be so enhanced with 38 people sitting around looking drooling bored or pissed, while 2 have no expression at all because they’re AFK and the entire raid is waiting for them.

By: Performing Avatar Gaze & Real Facial Animation in EQ2 | Ironyca Stood in the Fire

Sun, 03 Jun 2012 02:17:30 +0000

[...] actually wanted to write an article about performing gaze in WoW and whoopsie, I read on Spinksville that EverQuest 2 is allowing you to map real facial animation and voice fonts on to your [...]

By: depizan

depizan — Sat, 02 Jun 2012 22:12:25 +0000

It’s an interesting idea, but several problems (besides the aforementioned ones) leap to my mind:
My reactions as a player are not necessarily the reactions my character would have. (Example: I find the rather sadistic humor of SW:TOR to be hilarious. My characters, to whom said sadistic humor is happening, are not, for the most part, amused by it.)

The animation in most games isn’t good enough to copy real facial expressions well. You can really see that in the YouTube linked where the froglizardthingy (haven’t played EQII) just flaps its mouth while the guy talks, but I doubt that even better animated games could copy facial emotes well enough. It would make the fact that games aren’t movie-quality animated really obvious.

Most people – so far as I know – don’t actually use in game voice chat. They use ventrilo, teamspeak, skype, etc…

Also, I really don’t see the point to this unless the game world reacts to it, which would be pretty much impossible to code.

Though, that does make me think that they might be on to something if they created a character and world builder software with this technology embedded and sold it as a computer based “tabletop” rpg. That could be interesting for long distance gaming.

By: Jeromai

Jeromai — Sat, 02 Jun 2012 13:52:07 +0000

I’m seeing more opportunities for creepy griefing and jarring out-of-character experiences over immersive roleplaying though. Just sayin’.

That tongue on that Froglok, eeew.

By: spinks

spinks — Sat, 02 Jun 2012 12:43:00 +0000

It does put a different perspective on Do you want to date my avatar?

By: bhagpuss

bhagpuss — Sat, 02 Jun 2012 11:25:26 +0000

You don’t see the players! That would be horrible! You see the character moving its head in sync with how the player moves his or her head, that’s all.

As for the “uncanny valley” look, I pretty much only play animal/monster races so that doesn’t worry me much. I’d never willingly look an elf in the face in any game to begin with

By: Simon Jones who is Blogless

Simon Jones who is Blogless — Sat, 02 Jun 2012 10:59:46 +0000

Having seen MMO players…

No.

Let’s never, ever do this.

Ever.

By: spinks

spinks — Sat, 02 Jun 2012 10:44:58 +0000

I could see that as a possibility. It may end up feeling very natural. I may be just a bit too used to having voice chat as a ‘backchannel’ (ie. it isn’t supposed to represent things /my character/ would say.)