It’s not often that you get a chance to see the place where your childhood memories were literally built. It’s kind of like peeling back the curtain on your dreams and finding the architects of them busily at work, pulling the strings, painting the scenery, and creating the characters you will vividly remember decades later. That’s what it’s like to visit Jim Henson’s Creature Shop.
Jurassic Park III may not be your favorite movie in the series. But that doesn’t mean its effects weren’t fantastic. In fact, the somewhat random third entry in the series boasted the biggest animatronic ‘saur yet: the Spinosaurus. Stan Winston Studios recalls the details of that behemoth’s construction, and it’s wild to watch.
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As a young pup watching Jurassic Park, I was in terrified of the T-Rex, fearful of the Raptors, in awe of the Brachiosaurus and annoyed of that little spraying dinosaur. But probably above all, I felt for the Triceratops. It was hurt! It was dying! It was so incredibly detailed. Stan Winston School revealed how they built the Triceratops, how they painted it, how they shipped it and how the puppeteers controlled it in this video. Part two of the Triceratops video can be found here. [Stan Winston School] More »
Jurassic Park was awesome. Jurassic Park in 3D is awesome layered on awesome. And the tech behind the scenes? You can probably see where this is going. More »
This is half fascinating, half scary, and 100 percent freaky: Disney has invented a process to clone real humans into silicone-skinned robots. Their method analyzes the face of a target using 3D motion capture cameras. Then it calculates the precise shape, density and composition of a synthetic skin that accurately mimics that specific human’s expressions: More »
The minds at Disney Research aren’t only interested in tracking your face — they want to map, shave and clone it, too. Through a pair of research projects, Walt’s proteges have managed to create systems for not only mapping, digitally reconstructing and removing facial hair, but also for creating lifelike synthetic replicas of human faces for use in animatronics. Let’s start with the beards, shall we? Facial hair is a big part of a person’s physical identity, a quick shave can render a close friend unrecognizable — but modern face-capture systems aren’t really optimized for the stuff. Disney researchers attempted to address that issue by creating an algorithm that detects facial hair, reconstructs it in 3D and uses the information it gathers to suss out the shape of the skin underneath it. This produces a reconstruction of not only the skin episurface, but also of the subject’s individual hairs, meaning the final product can be viewed with or without a clean shave.
Another Disney team is also taking a careful look at the human face, but is working on more tangible reconstructions — specifically for use on audio-animatronic robots. The team behind the Physical Face Cloning project hope to automate part of creating animatronics to speed up the task of replicating a human face for future Disney robots. This complicated process involves capturing a subjects face under a variety of conditions and using that data to optimize a composition of synthetic skin to best match the original. Fully bearded animatronic clones are still a ways off, of course, but isn’t it comforting to know that Disney could one day replace you accurately replicate your visage in Walt Disney World for posterity? Dive into the specifics of the research at the source links below, or read on for a video summary of the basics.
Filed under: Misc. Gadgets, Robots, Software
Disney researchers can now digitally shave your face, clone it for animatronics (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 12 Aug 2012 03:15:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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It worked just fine for Pinocchio, so why not animatronic stuffed bears? A group of researchers from the Tokyo University of Technology are on hand at SIGGRAPH’s Emerging Technologies section this week to demonstrate “Stuffed Toys Alive!,” a new type of interactive toy that replaces the rigid plastic infrastructure used today with a seemingly simple string pulley-based solution. Several strings are installed at different points within each of the cuddly gadget’s limbs, then attached to a motor that pulls the strings to move the fuzzy guy’s arms while also registering feedback, letting it respond to touch as well. There’s not much more to it than that — the project is ingenious but also quite simple, and it’s certain to be a hit amongst youngsters. The obligatory creepy hands-on video is waiting just past the break.
Gallery: Stuffed Toys Alive! hands-on
Filed under: Robots
Stuffed Toys Alive! replaces mechanical limbs with strings for a much softer feel (hands-on) originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 10 Aug 2012 11:32:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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