TED2019: Live Virtual Version Of Digital Domain’s Doug Roble In Real Time

TED2019: Live Virtual Version Of Digital Domain’s Doug Roble In Real Time

Digital Domain Head of Software R&D Doug Roble demonstrated a live synced virtual version of himself.

Digital Domain Head of Software R&D Doug Roble, and for the first time, his virtual avatar DigiDoug, presented a talk at TED2019 on what it takes to create a digital human. DigiDoug is the industry-leading work of the Digital Human Group, a unit within global visual effects studio Digital Domain overseen by VFX industry veterans Darren Hendler and Doug Roble. The group is focused on the creation of digital humans, creatures and characters for feature films, live real time events and new technology applications.

Digital Domain and Digital Human Group partners involved with the creation of DigiDoug include

Vision and Graphics Lab, USC Institute for Creative Technologies, to capture Doug’s facial detail in high resolution
Unreal Engine from Epic Games, the real time engine used to render DigiDoug and Elbor
NVIDIA, for graphics processing units for rendering and machine learning
Dimensional Imaging(DI4D™), to capture Doug’s facial movements
Xsens, a motion capture system to capture Doug’s body movements
IKINEMA, streams, retargets and cleans Doug’s body performance and synchronises movements onto DigiDoug and Elbor in real-time
Manus VR, gloves used to capture Doug’s hand and finger movements in real time
Fox VFX Lab, the helmet camera system to capture data for training and use on stage for real time performance.

About Digital Domain

Digital Domain creates transportive experiences that entertain, inform and inspire. Throughout the last quarter of a century, the studio has grown to lead the visual effects industry, expanding globally into digital humans, virtual production, previsualization and virtual reality, and adding commercials, game cinematics and episodics to its robust film roster. Digital Domain’s rich legacy consists of hundreds of blockbuster feature films for every major studio and thousands of commercials, music videos, game cinematics and digital content by world-renowned directors and brands.

About TED

TED is a nonprofit organization devoted to Ideas Worth Spreading, often in the form of short talks delivered by leading thinkers and doers. Many of these talks are given at TED conferences, including our annual gathering in Vancouver, as well as TEDWomen, intimate TED Salons and thousands of independently organized TEDx events around the world. Videos of these talks are made available, free, on TED.com and other platforms. Audio versions of the talks from TED2019 will also be published to TED’s podcast TED Talks Daily, available on Apple Podcasts and all other podcast platforms.

Source: Xsens, Digital Domain