Software engineer Ma Wan-chun (馬萬鈞) and a team based at the University of Southern California (USC) were acknowledged by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for their face-digitizing technology, which has been advancing visual effects for a decade.
Ma, who now works as an engineer for Google, on Feb. 9 was awarded the Scientific and Technical Achievement Award along with his colleagues at the 91st Academy Awards for their computer graphics technology developed at the university’s Institute for Creative Technologies.
Their polarized spherical gradient illumination technology is a facial appearance capture method that uses a dome-shaped object called “Light Stage X,” Google said.
When an actor performs inside Light Stage X, they are illuminated by about 300 LEDs and their gestures are captured by cameras from different angles.
The footage is converted into a 3D model that is then used for visual effects, enabling the computer to understand the geometry, pore texture and light properties of the actor’s face, Google said.
Ma said that the technology, which can generate lifelike facial expressions, has transformed the movie industry.
For example, it created an older version of Brad Pitt in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008), brought the Na’vi tribe to the screen in Avatar (2009) and recreated Paul Walker’s performance in Furious 7 (2015) after the actor passed away mid-production.
Ma said that he has always been fascinated by visual effects in movies and video games, such as the diverse alien characters in the Star Wars movie series and the combination of real actors and animated backgrounds in the 1994 game Wing Commander 3.
As the field of computer graphics is still in its infancy in Taiwan, the Graduate Student Study Abroad Program of the National Science Council helped him pursue his studies, Ma said.
Under the program, he went to USC, where his faculty adviser, Paul Debevec, brought Ma into his research team in 2005 to help develop the facial capture system.
Ma said that instead of only researching for his doctoral dissertation, he always wanted to put his expertise into practice, and the work at USC helped him “turn imagination into reality.”
The team’s next step is to transfer the realistic visual effects presented in theaters to smartphones by applying the technology to the fields of augmented reality and virtual reality, Ma said.
LOUD AND PROUD Taiwan might have taken a drubbing against Australia and Japan, but you might not know it from the enthusiasm and numbers of the fans Taiwan might not be expected to win the World Baseball Classic (WBC) but their fans are making their presence felt in Tokyo, with tens of thousands decked out in the team’s blue, blowing horns and singing songs. Taiwanese fans have packed out the Tokyo Dome for all three of their games so far and even threatened to drown out home team supporters when their team played Japan on Friday. They blew trumpets, chanted for their favorite players and had their own cheerleading squad who dance on a stage during the game. The team struggled to match that exuberance on the field, with
Taiwanese paleontologists have discovered fossil evidence that pythons up to 4m long inhabited Taiwan during the Pleistocene epoch, reporting their findings in the international scientific journal Historical Biology. National Taiwan University (NTU) Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology associate professor Tsai Cheng-hsiu (蔡政修) led the team that discovered the largest snake fossil ever found in Taiwan. The single trunk vertebra was discovered in Tainan at the Chiting Formation, dated to between 400,000 and 800,000 years ago in the Middle Pleistocene, the paper said. The area also produced Taiwan’s first avian fossil, as well as crocodile, mammoth, saber-toothed cat and rhinoceros fossils, it said. Discoveries
Taiwanese paleontologists have discovered fossil evidence that pythons up to 4m long inhabited Taiwan during the Pleistocene epoch, reporting their findings in the international scientific journal Historical Biology. National Taiwan University (NTU) Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology associate professor Tsai Cheng-hsiu (蔡政修) led the team that discovered the largest snake fossil ever found in Taiwan. A single trunk vertebra was discovered in Tainan at the Chiting Formation, dated to between 800,000 to 400,000 years ago in the Middle Pleistocene, the paper said. The area also produced Taiwan’s first avian fossil, as well as crocodile, mammoth, sabre-toothed cat and rhinoceros fossils, it said. Discoveries
Whether Japan would help defend Taiwan in case of a cross-strait conflict would depend on the US and the extent to which Japan would be allowed to act under the US-Japan Security Treaty, former Japanese minister of defense Satoshi Morimoto said. As China has not given up on the idea of invading Taiwan by force, to what extent Japan could support US military action would hinge on Washington’s intention and its negotiation with Tokyo, Morimoto said in an interview with the Liberty Times (sister paper of the Taipei Times) yesterday. There has to be sufficient mutual recognition of how Japan could provide
RSS