Thoughts Shape Recognition and Immersion

Today on October 4^th I took a tour of the Visualization Design Institute (VDI) at Sheridan College Institute of Technology and Advanced Learning. VDI is a government funded applied research facility located on campus. Their website is http://visualization.ca/. We got a glimpse of advance facial recognition software. Song Ho Ahn was the developer of this technology. He did the primary programming in C+ for the software. He developed his own GUI since he has a degree of Engineering in Electrical and Control Engineering from Hong-Ik University, Seoul, South Korea. The program used camera to gather data from the users face. It would then match up with a 3d human model to certain areas of the persons face. In real time the person could move his head and the 3d model would duplicates the movement in a life like motion. The camera sensor focused on the eyes and mouth to perceive movement.

From a multimedia pioneer point of view it was quite inspirational. Though its still a current work in progress you can see many useful applications for it. Such as character animation in movies and games. As well it could be used to detect facial features for security or identifying criminals.

There is other facial recognition software out there too. The site http://www.face-rec.org/research-groups/ list different research groups across the world who is also working on facial recognition. Another similar field is image recognition. You use the computer to analyze an image of a person to find similarities of other people’s pictures. The following is a link of a video showing this type of software in action. http://youtube.com/watch?v=aVGovK_J4c4 There is also an interesting website called My Heritage. http://www.myheritage.com/FP/Company/tryFaceRecognition.php It uses image facial recognition to match an uploaded picture of your self to a celebrity. You can also use it to compare family gemology in pictures. Or find out what parent you have more physical traits from.

Also on our tour we took a look at their Immersion studio. It uses 3 projectors to project on a movie on 3 screens. The two side screens are angled to give a greater sense of immersion. The sounds system was really quite impressive too. The movie was a 3d animation of a space station and a look into the human body. We were given touch tablets and were able to click on images on the tablet’s LCD screen to make a choice that impacted the movie itself.

It definitely created a more immersive movie watching experience. I could see how the movie industry could use this type of technology to get more people into theatres. It went beyond something like the IMAX experience. http://www.imax.com/ImaxWeb/imaxExperience.do?param_section=whatImax&param_subMenuSelect=whatImaxSelect. IMAX uses a massive screen and an amazing sound system to attract more viewers.

I think it would help combat movie piracy. It could also be used in the game industry to create a more immersive experience. The 3d environment would be all around you instead of just the screen in front of the player. It would be awesome if they could perfect it so you can be completed surrounded by one screen that interact to your movement. Taking both the motion recognition and immersion technology and putting it all together for the ultimate experience.