The Digital Eye : Image Metrics Attempts to Leap the Uncanny Valley

I may have been wrong last month in A Coruña Spain, when I predicted that it would be two years before we establish a beachhead on the far side of the Uncanny Valley. (If you don't know what that is, Google it immediately.) While attending Mundos Digitales, I went to a presentation by Dr. Paul Debevec [2] on his latest work for USC's Institute for Creative Technologies, Computer Vision Lab. He talked about his sophisticated LightStage research into mapping faces in extreme detail. He mentioned that he was working with Image Metrics' Santa Monica, California, office, developing extremely high-resolution reference data for an advanced new process in markerless face capture and animation. He was pretty sure Image Metrics was about to achieve a breakthrough in virtual human face animation. Whenever Debevec gets involved in something, it's going to be done creatively and properly as well. Since I was there speaking about crossing the Uncanny Valley, this news immediately caught my attention.