At Laval Virtual‘s 19th Annual Conference, SIGGRAPH 2017 Emerging Technologies Chair Jeremy Kenisky presented a special prize to competition winner “Real Baby – Real Family.” The “Real Baby” project creates an age controllable VR avatar from 2D face images, and was shown at Laval Virtual by Yuya Mochizuki, Akihiko Shirai, and Rex Hsieh. Due to its success at Laval Virtual, this special project will be shown as part of the Emerging Technologies program within the SIGGRAPH 2017 Experience Hall in Los Angeles, 30 July–3 August.
“Real Baby – Real Family” is the first experience to create a VR virtual baby with strong resemblance to two participants. By combining two photographs of the participants with other images and then creating a new image by averaging the different images, “Real Baby” is able to generate a photo to the participants’ liking. The image generating system also enables the generation of a baby image from heterosexual couples, homosexual couples, or a combination of photographs and illustrations, making it very flexible. “Real Baby” also enables haptics and audio in addition to visual feedback between players and babies, which is another element previous research has lacked. Finally, the system used is relatively cost effective and can easily be ported to different households. Check out a demo below.
ACM SIGGRAPH is a Laval Virtual institutional partner.
