Advanced Virtual Human (AVH) is a novel technology enabling the creation of visually realistic characters that can act and express emotions that go far beyond existing avatars or other commercial virtual humans. Our approach is to generate characters that look like humans, can be guided by software in real-time, and can be generated at relatively low costs.
The Advanced Virtual Human engine renders in real-time highly realistic characters using state of the art rendering algorithms. The characters are based on real people. We used special equipment to capture the subtle details of the human face. Facial expressions were generated in the same manner as the creation of the faces. Real time physics algorithms is used in order to present the female character with long and naturally moving hair.
The first two Advanced Virtual Human characters (male and female) created were developed during CAP. These characters were presented in several forums to virtual reality experts, computer graphic experts and software developers for human-computer interactions and police personnel. They were very impressed with the realism of our characters and their special features. We also carried out a preliminary experiment over the internet where 3D pictures of our characters were presented next to other 3D pictures, computer-generated by the best approaches available. Viewers were asked to indicate the realism of the character. There were 40 participants: 18 males and 22 females, ranging in age between 20 and 60. The average realism score of our Almog character was 3.65 compared to 3.25 of the other best method. A picture of a real person received 4.2.
The video clip to the right is a video recording of Almog - our virtual female character. The clip was captured directly from our Advanced Virtual Human engine. As can be seen in the video, we implemented state of the art Subsurface Scattering rendering algorithm to render realistic human skin. By paying close attention to the changing light one can see the soft lighting created by the shading algorithm
The second Advanced Virtual Human is Noam. Advances in graphical hardware, scanning technologies, motion capture systems and real time rendering algorithms enable us to present highly realistic virtual humans based on 3D scanning at a low cost. These characters can express facial expressions based on 3D scanning.
