Linden Lab Introduces Expressive Puppeteering to Second Life: Financial News – Yahoo! Finance
Here’s the article, but the short form:
To create an animation, residents simply grab an avatar’s body part and move it in the desired way. The avatar then “learns” the animation and gestures accordingly.
One thing you have to give the Lindens credit for: they actually go ahead and do some of the things that people have been talking about for years but just never got around to.
Ermmm….they may be working on this in the Lab? But they didn’t download it yet into the game as something people can actually use. Just sayin’.
Well, now that they put out a press release, I am guessing you will see it in short order. 🙂
Sounds like poser.
You just knwo what half the folsk will use this for – 5 mins after it goes live. And thats why no other game has ever introduced it 🙂 SWG enterainers would have made a fortune, Lucas would have went “spare” tm – Terry Pratchett 🙂
Half? I think you underestimate the booming “entertainment industry” of Second Life. 🙂
I had a longer responce…screw it. “All your baseness belong to us”, or something like that. What an industry. Sex, greed, selfishness.
And no, I hadn’t been to Broken Toys yet.
I’m wondering if this is fallout from some of the chats Linden Labs was having with Paul Marino. They’ve got a lot of growth in the in-game machinima sector there, and this is the kind of thing that really makes machinima geeks drool. Really, Second Life is the only place I can think of where you can not only hire real people, in-game, to be cast and crew (everything from set designers to hairdressers), but you can even screen your movie for an audience in-game, when you’re done.
I once used Metatools Poser quite alot for quick renderings when we needed to show how something was used. It functioned much the same way as this sounds, including the ability to record sequences as you modified the form.
This is a good idea. I wonder how long it’ll be before we see a SL-branded mocap upper-body suit. Now that would be real cool, particularly if you want to have conferences involving both real people and virtual ones. More expressive interfaces can always make up for the lack of an AI to fill in the gaps our minds and eyes are expecting from rendered humans.