Words You Can Use: The BAVC BLOG

On November 16, 2006, Mindy Aronoff, BAVC’s Director of Business Development, talked with three industry leaders about their fields and the future of media technology. She spoke with:

• Ken Pierce, Head of Motion Research at MOVA and former Director of Animation Software Development and Director of R&D at PDI/Dreamworks. Earlier this year, MOVA introduced Contour, a breakthrough motion-capture technology that allows cameras to digitally capture people in photographic, three-dimensional detail.
• Bathsheba Malsheen, former CEO of Groove Mobile, the leading mobile music service provider, and a member of BAVC’s Board of Directors; Bathsheba has a linguistics Ph.D. and has worked since the 70’s in the areas of speech engineering, speech recognition, text-to-speech and audio compression.
• Rich Hintz, a technology consultant working with the Corporation for Education Network Initiatives in California (CENIC). CENIC designs, implements, and operates CalREN, the California Research and Education Network, a high-bandwidth, high-capacity Internet network specially designed to meet the unique requirements California’s education and research communities.

MA: Ken, how did you get into motion capture?

KP: I hooked up with Steve Perlman, who was the principal behind Web TV. He’s got a technology incubator, and we’re looking at different kinds of motion capture. We’ve built this system that Steve likes to call “volumetric cinematography.” Basically, we’re looking at facial animation; how difficult that is to do. So (with Contour Reality Capture technology), there’s an array of cameras, a person stands in front of it and does their acting and basically, instead of taking a picture of someone at 24 frames per second, we’re actually scanning them at 24/30 frames per second. Recreating their face in 3D geometry.

RH: Do you put sensors on their faces at all?

KP: No. We do put a pattern on there that makes it easier for the camera to see the distortion in their faces…simple glow-in-the-dark makeup, like Halloween makeup. The actor just sponges on makeup in a random pattern. MOVA’s engineers figured out how to get fluorescent lights to strobe at about 90 frames per second; so you’re in this room, it’s lit up by these lights that are strobing really quickly and the cameras are synchronized with the lights. So when the lights are off, some cameras open their shutters, and all they capture, because of the glow-in-dark paint, are the patterns on the person’s face. There are other cameras that only open up their shutters when the lights are on, and all that is invisible to you, because all that is happening at the same time. Basically, all the cameras that see the facial pattern, they triangulate on that pattern and they can resolve that to a really fine, fine level of detail.

BM: Do you share any technology with the face-recognition people? You know, biometric technology?

KP: No. We are talking to a lot of people…and some are from the medical industry, but right now we’re getting the whole thing up and running. We’re dealing mostly with the entertainment industry right now. What’s interesting is that typically, you do [motion capture] with markers. We’ve done that, too, because we wanted to understand how it was done. But this is really a different sort of thing, because the amount of data is so rich that you stop talking about how many points of data you’re capturing and realize you’re really recreating a likeness of a person. But instead of that likeness being an image, that likeness is actually a model. It’s many, many models per second.

Mindy Aronoff: How about you, Bathsheba? How did you get into the tech world?

Bathsheba Malsheen: Until six months ago I was the CEO of a company called Groove Mobile in Massachusetts. Groove Mobile is the leading mobile music service provider, [operating] the Sprint music store, the Bell Canada music store, the Orange music store in the UK, music stores in Hungary, Portugal – these are all carriers that are becoming media companies. The next big thing is going to be the creation and development of unique content for small devices, for mobile devices. No one is doing that right now. What they are doing is transferring content that was originally developed for the TV screen or the PC.

I got into [this area] through audio and speech compression. I was in audio compression for about ten years, [working with] different formats of audio compression to put in games [and] all types of multimedia devices. There are a lot of start-ups right now that are being funded to develop tools for mobile devices so that the content creators can figure out what special kind of content they want for the small screen. User interface, formatting, all those issues are going to be big issues. Video is still up in the air, and there’s still a lot of work on compression, a lot of proprietary algorithms – no real standards that have stuck.

Mindy: And Rich? Can you explain what you do and how you got into technology?

Rich Hintz: CENIC is a consortium that was formed initially by a bunch of educational high-end research universities in California to provide (over time), higher-end networking among them, and also to get down to the K-12 area – basically, to enable everyone to get connected better. There are three tiers of networking – fast networking, at about a 2.5 gigabit level; mainstream networking – at a 10 gigabit level; and there are multiples of that, which is kind of an experimental network. And the higher you go, it’s somewhat less reliable for the service because it’s a bit more experimental. (more…)