I am also in the middle of trying to raise angel funding and that is also looking very promising, more on that as it comes. I intend to blog my history of entrepreneurship and all of the bruises that have come with it in the months to come.

Since late 2005 I have been involved with a web 2.0 start up http://www.zukool.com and that has been over 2 years in the making. Now I am back to Emotion AI full time (I hope) and will be finally getting a production ready SDK out before the end of the year (it is already being integrated deeply into a customers product as we speak and if things go well there that product will be released in the not too distant future with “Emotion AI Inside”).

While they built an impressive sounding system at the M.I.T Synthetic Characters lab to internally model, specifically dog, behavior this article also talks about points of note in terms of using anticipatory actions to aid story telling and the transmission of the characters state.

This system is then heavily dependant on planning, world modeling and having a comparator system, all very major systems in their own right. In order to transmit intention the character must first plan that intention (enough that some action can be taken before the main action), for example looking at a cup before reacing to grasp the cup. Many big problems, having an in house solution makes sense here, especially given Blue Fangs singular focus on animal based games. I have high hopes of good things to come.

This is perhaps understandable when you realize that Albert Hubo was being showcased at a trade fair that showed the best of Korean technology and as the show organizer, Esmond Oh, put it

“Albert Hubo,’’ a humanoid robot with the face of Albert Einstein and digital Korean traditional garden were most popular among the (visiting world- ) leaders.

Oh dear (bad pun). I am sure George Bush would have been pleased to know the technology he was admiring here was developed in Texas (if Im not mistaken).

Anyway, more interesting for me was to find that the face has 31 motors (or degrees of freedom as these robot types like to call it) which would give it a pretty large range of possible gestures, probably similar to the Phillip K Dick model that Hanson Robotics built (video on their site and on other posts here). No doubt very impressive but as yet lacking a continuous control system.

Apparently there is a video of this somewhere, anyone have a link?

For a game where portraying emotion is one of the core requirements, it’s bizarre that these puppets can’t portray emotion. For example, during one of the bath scenes, it gives you the option to select what emotion they are feeling during their bath: happy, sad, scared, etc.
Selecting this emotion slams a rictus death mask on their face which parodies that emotion. That’s all. You select happy, he puts on the Joker’s grin and it stays there, never wavering, for the entire 10 second scene.

Another poster on the GTXa site says:

… Lionhead could have gotten a much better execution had they paid attention to some of the recent work in expressive AI and animation …

Heres an interesting little story, I gave my first technology preview demo to Lionhead at their studios south of London 2 years ago, to the AI team (who I generally place squarely in the realm of innovators) who seemed very well impressed with my technology. Unfortuately at the time they were in crunch mode and Peter Molyneux (who I had talked to at length about emotional characters a few years before) only had time to pop his head through the door (I think he was looking to see why his AI team were not busy coding!) and missed the demo (dammit).

So its not like the guys there did not know this technology was not available. The reason I went to Lionhead first (even above the Japanese developers in my own back yard) was that they were and still are building products where my technology could play a prominant and deep role. This could have been the case with “The Movies”, it would have been amazing to see those actors with realtime emotional facial gestures. Oh, well, you win some you lose some but you fight another day. If you are reading Lionhead team we can add an extra dimension to your games, go on, you know it makes sense ;)

I am suprised by this somewhat, even as of last month this robot had not been seen and the Machine Control Lab of Professor Jun-Ho Oh only presented the last KH3 at the beginning of this year and that had no human face at all. Thats quite a change for one version, they must have been impressed when they saw Kokoro Dreams Actroid at the Aichi World Expo in Japan (nothing like a bit of friendly *cough* Korea / Japan rivaly to get innovators worked up). I will try and find more information about what technology they are using for gesture control and generation.