"Mixamo, a startup that helps game developers animate 3D characters in their games and apps, is launching something pretty neat today. Face Plus is a service that lets developers animate characters simply by recording their facial expressions through a webcam.
The service was built with the help of AMD, the semiconductor company that is also a strategic investor in Mixamo. They say AMD helped Mixamo with development of the tool through OpenCL, an open standard for parallel programming of heterogeneous systems.
To develop it, they had to train their software with hundreds of images and videos of people from different ethnic backgrounds, ages and genders all with many different facial expressions.
The company has raised about $11 million to date and has clients including Microsoft, EA, Sony, Blizzard and Gameloft."
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Face Plus was developed for devices that support OpenCL 1.1 or newer versions. Face Plus enables rich, detailed motion capture at full camera frame rates, including typical standard webcam conditions, using an AMD APU. It runs optimally on AMD APUs and GPUs; a system powered by an AMD A10-4600M APU was capable of up to 42 frames-per-second captures in real-time with GPU-acceleration enabled, a 13X performance improvement when compared to using CPU processing alone.
By leveraging the full, massive compute power of AMD APUs and GPUs, developers can animate 3D characters in real time allowing for simplified workflows and fewer interruptions in the creative process.
While real-time motion capture of facial expressions is currently available as a development tool for content creation, it has the potential to make its way into consumer software such as video games and video conferencing applications, giving consumers the opportunity to animate avatars in real time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=AOWNusV07-E
http://techcrunch.com/2013/08/28/mixamo-face-plus/
The service was built with the help of AMD, the semiconductor company that is also a strategic investor in Mixamo. They say AMD helped Mixamo with development of the tool through OpenCL, an open standard for parallel programming of heterogeneous systems.
To develop it, they had to train their software with hundreds of images and videos of people from different ethnic backgrounds, ages and genders all with many different facial expressions.
The company has raised about $11 million to date and has clients including Microsoft, EA, Sony, Blizzard and Gameloft."
*
Face Plus was developed for devices that support OpenCL 1.1 or newer versions. Face Plus enables rich, detailed motion capture at full camera frame rates, including typical standard webcam conditions, using an AMD APU. It runs optimally on AMD APUs and GPUs; a system powered by an AMD A10-4600M APU was capable of up to 42 frames-per-second captures in real-time with GPU-acceleration enabled, a 13X performance improvement when compared to using CPU processing alone.
By leveraging the full, massive compute power of AMD APUs and GPUs, developers can animate 3D characters in real time allowing for simplified workflows and fewer interruptions in the creative process.
While real-time motion capture of facial expressions is currently available as a development tool for content creation, it has the potential to make its way into consumer software such as video games and video conferencing applications, giving consumers the opportunity to animate avatars in real time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=AOWNusV07-E
http://techcrunch.com/2013/08/28/mixamo-face-plus/
