User blogs

One of the most difficult tasks in the increasingly high-fidelity world of gaming is making realistic-looking people — especially faces. Epic today showed off a new character creation tool in Unreal Engine that lets you make a near-infinite variety of near-photorealistic digital people with far less effort than it might have taken before.

MetaHuman Creator is an application for designing characters that lets people mix and match presets then dive into the tiniest details. It’s a cloud-hosted service, since the amount of computing power and storage needed to render these characters at this resolution and level of lighting and so on is more than most people will have on hand.

Anyone who’s used a high-quality character creator will recognize the pieces — a few dozen hairstyles, ear types, beards and lip shapes, which can be added, subtracted and adjusted like a digital Mr. Potato Head. Bet you didn’t see that reference coming!

Image Credits: Epic

The difference between MetaHuman and, say, a state of the art consumer-level creator like Cyberpunk 2077’s is fidelity and flexibility. As you can see in the videos, the quality of the hair, skin, eyes, teeth and so on is extremely high — the older fellow on the left has quite realistic wrinkles that shadow and deform properly when he moves his face, and the way the light interacts with the center lady’s light skin is very different from that of the dark-skinned man on the right.

The “center lady” also started as a middle-aged man and was sculpted piece by piece to her current look rather than just switching to a “feminine” preset, demonstrating that the faces don’t “break” if you manipulate them too much — a risk in other creators for sure. You can see the process in fast-forward in the video below:

Naturally it also integrates with the usual creator tools, allowing for animation by various means, fiddling with meshes and exporting for use in other tools.

This level of detail isn’t exactly unprecedented, but the amount of work that goes into rendering a main character good enough for extreme close-ups and microexpressions is huge. Epic’s approach is not just to increase the potential quality of the assets and lighting and so on but to make it easy and efficient to implement. If only AAA studios can muster the resources to make characters like this, it’s not healthy for gaming as a whole.

Epic was humble enough to give credit right off the bat to companies like 3Lateral and Cubic Motion, both specialists in the field it has acquired. The Unreal Engine is presented as a sort of monolithic advance in computer graphics and design, but really it’s a very cleverly assembled amalgamation of dozens of improvements and advances made by individual (now acquired) companies and divisions over the years — more like an operating system with a bunch of integrated applications at this point.

MetaHuman Creator isn’t quite ready for use by just anyone, but Epic is running an early-access program you can sign up for, and they’ve provided a pair of models for you to play with in your existing Unreal Engine environment in the meantime (check the “Learn” tab).

Source: https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/10/epic-shows-off-unreals-nearly-real-metahuman-3d-character-creator/

Mobile analytics and market data company App Annie launched a new app today that CEO Ted Krantz said is built not for the analyst who’s “immersed in the data,” but rather the executive who needs “a much more elevated, top-down view.”

The biggest new piece of the company’s Pulse app is something called the App Annie Performance Score, which Krantz compares to a FICO score for mobile apps. The idea is to take an app’s user acquisition, engagement, monetization and sentiment and boil them down into a single score that benchmarks how the app is performing relative to the competition.

Krantz said that eventually, the performance store could become more customizable for each customer, so that  “you can tailor it to the metrics that matter to you.” The app also highlights any shifts in key app metrics and identifies potential causes, and it includes a newsfeed showing what’s happening to the apps and markets that a user follows.

Image Credits: App Annie

The goal, Krantz added, is to provide executives with a quick overview of the data they need without requiring them to dig through it or wait for a report — especially as “mobile is becoming such an imperative.” It’s the team’s “aspiration” to create an app that executives check every day, though he’s not necessarily expecting that to happen initially.

The Pulse app is based on App Annie’s market-level data, so Krantz said it shouldn’t be affected by Apple’s upcoming privacy changes. At the same time, he acknowledged that the company’s broader goals of bringing together first-party and third-party data are starting too look “a little tricky.”

App Annie Pulse is currently available on iOS, with the company planning to launch an Android version in the second quarter of this year. And while Pulse is only available to paying App Annie customers, Krantz said there are also plans for “revamping the free side of the equation and make that a little more meaty.”

Source: https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/10/app-annie-pulse/

NASA will provide 1,000 of its employees, including 150 astronauts, with Fitbit devices in a pilot program designed to see if they can help supplement efforts to keep these mission-critical personnel healthy ahead of key space missions. The program will see NASA employees outfitted with a wearable and provided access to a daily check-in app they can use to log potential symptoms, as well as their body temperature and other key health metrics, which could potentially help spot developing cases.

NASA has already been taking measures to isolate astronauts and to limit or prevent the spread of COVID-19 across its facilities, which are located across the U.S. It has of course followed local guidelines and requirements regarding COVID-19 protections, but it also introduced its own level-based system last year and implemented remote work protocols for many employees wherever possible. On the astronaut side, it has also beefed up existing isolation and sequestration procedures that are already quite strict in order to guarantee that its spacefarers don’t get sick before they’re set to make a trip to the International Space Station.

The new Fitbit program is designed to supplement those existing measures, providing tracked health metrics including resting heart rate and heart rate variability, as well as respiratory rate, changes in all of which have been linked to COVID-19. Those stats, along with the self-reported metrics logged by users themselves, including any reports of potential symptoms, will be used by the app to provide individuals in the program with guidance about whether they should go into work, or stay home and take additional measures to find out if they have COVID-19.

Fitbit is already engaged in studies to determine whether its wearable devices and the metrics they log can be useful in providing early COVID-19 detection. Regardless of those results, self-reporting as well as the baseline health metrics that the app logs from its devices are already likely to be handy in providing a supplement to existing self-assessment measures regarding the level of risk you pose to others if you’re feeling off, which is the primary purpose of this program with NASA.

Source: https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/10/nasa-will-use-fitbits-to-help-prevent-spread-of-covid-19-to-astronauts-and-employees/

One of the most difficult tasks in the increasingly high-fidelity world of gaming is making realistic-looking people — especially faces. Epic today showed off a new character creation tool in Unreal Engine that lets you make a near-infinite variety of near-photorealistic digital people with far less effort than it might have taken before.

MetaHuman Creator is an application for designing characters that lets people mix and match presets then dive into the tiniest details. It’s a cloud-hosted service, since the amount of computing power and storage needed to render these characters at this resolution and level of lighting and so on is more than most people will have on hand.

Anyone who’s used a high-quality character creator will recognize the pieces — a few dozen hairstyles, ear types, beards, and lip shapes, which can be added, subtracted, and adjusted like a digital Mr Potato Head. Bet you didn’t see that reference coming!

Image Credits: Epic

The difference between MetaHuman and, say, a state of the art consumer level creator like Cyberpunk 2077’s is fidelity and flexibility. As you can see in the videos, the quality of the hair, skin, eyes, teeth, and so on is extremely high — the older fellow on the left has has quite realistic wrinkles that shadow and deform properly when he moves his face, and the way the light interacts with the center lady’s light skin is very different from that of the dark-skinned man on the right.

The “center lady” also started as a middle-aged man, and was sculpted piece by piece to her current look rather than just switching to a “feminine” preset, demonstrating that the faces don’t “break” if you manipulate them too much — a risk in other creators for sure. You can see the process in fast forward in the video below:

Naturally it also integrates with the usual creator tools, allowing for animation by various means, fiddling with meshes, and exporting for use in other tools.

This level of detail isn’t exactly unprecedented, but the amount of work that goes into rendering a main character good enough for extreme close-ups and microexpressions is huge. Epic’s approach is not just to increase the potential quality of the assets and lighting and so on but to make it easy and efficient to implement. If only AAA studios can muster the resources to make characters like this, it’s not healthy for gaming as a whole.

Epic was humble enough to give credit right off the bat to companies like 3Lateral and Cubic Motion, both specialists in the field it has acquired. The Unreal Engine is presented as a sort of monolithic advance in computer graphics and design, but really it’s a very cleverly assembled amalgamation of dozens of improvements and advances made by individual (now acquired) companies and divisions over the years — more like an operating system with a bunch of integrated applications at this point.

MetaHuman Creator isn’t quite ready for use by just anyone, but Epic is running an early access program you can sign up for, and they’ve provided a pair of models for you to play with in your existing Unreal Engine environment in the meantime (check the “Learn” tab).

Source: https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/10/epic-shows-off-unreals-nearly-real-metahuman-3d-character-creator/

As the second impeachment trial of his presidency unfolds, there’s another bit of bad news for the former president. In a new interview on CNBC’s Squawk Box, Twitter Chief Financial Officer Ned Segal gave the decisive word on how the company would handle Trump’s Twitter account long term.

Responding to a question about what would happen if Trump ran again and was elected to office, Segal didn’t mince words.

“The way our policies work, when you’re removed from the platform, you’re removed from the platform — whether you’re a commentator, you’re a CFO, or you are a former or current public official,” Segal said.

“Remember, our policies are designed to make sure that people are not inciting violence, and if anybody does that, we have to remove them from the service and our policies don’t allow people to come back.”

Twitter banned Trump from its platform one month ago citing concerns about the “risk of further incitement of violence.” Trump’s role in instigating the deadly attack on the U.S. Capitol ultimately sealed his fate on his platform of choice, where he’d spent four years rallying his followers, amplifying conspiracies and lambasting his critics.

Source: https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/10/twitter-trump-banned-forever/