SA company taking animation world by storm with interactive speech animation

A Johannesburg-based animation company, Digital Arts, has caused quite a stir in the local and international animation market with their new interactive animation speech technology, which has created a new genre of lip-sync animation. After three years of R&D, they have perfected and patented a voice engine that generates near perfect real-time lip-sync in any animated character.

Ron Major, CEO of Digital Arts, says he is overwhelmed by the response he has been receiving, both locally and internationally. "We are receiving enquiries and requests for demos from all over the world," he says. "Many world class animation studios and R&D companies before us have tried to do what we`ve done but none achieved more than a very limited success.

Major explains further, "Our lip-sync voice engine is based on the premise that phonetically all mouth movements in any language can be broken down into about nine different positions. Our engineers began to design a voice engine without any pre-conceived ideas about what can or can`t be done with voice and within months we had our first rudimentary synchronised talking head."

One of the initial problems they faced was the cost factor. To achieve the illusion of real-time accurate lip-sync animation requires the sort of visual computer-intensive power that until now one found only on expensive UNIX systems, which would make Digital Arts` lip-sync system very costly. The launch of Silicon Graphics` new NT Visual Workstation offered the solution.

"To me Silicon`s new NT box offers the best power-price combination on the market," continues Major. "With even the smaller 320 coming with a 450 MHz processor, 6 gig hard-drive and 650 Megs of ram as standard, there is no other computer on the market at the price that comes close. This now gives us the computing power to offer our new lip-sync technology at an affordable price.

"From our talking head we kept on expanding in scope. We now have a product that allows any character, either in 2-D or 3-D, to be created with fully choreographed animated sequences, which are input into our system. Then a human, a comedian or whatever who is hidden away from the audience`s view, speaks into a microphone and the character perfectly mimics his speech.

What creates such a stir with audiences who have seen the product in action is the fact that unbeknown to them there is a microphone and mini digital camera concealed on top of the screen. This allows the hidden comedian or MC to see whom he is talking to and hear what they are saying, allowing the character on-screen to appear to have a real, spontaneous two-way conversation with them.

To further enhance the illusion of realism, the hidden MC has with him a simple interface that allows him, at the click of a few buttons, to alter the facial expressions and movements of the animated character on-screen. Thus the physical expressions of the character appear to respond quite naturally to what it is saying and to what is being said by the members of the audience.

Major is enthusiastic about the potential applications for the new product. He stresses that it is not intended to replace normal animation or performance animation. "We`ve really created a new genre of animation, a new usage of it. It is way cheaper than performance animation and much more flexible. The character can be a coffee-cup, a tin can, a pencil, a spider or an alien.

" It can have twenty legs or two, and even the mouth doesn`t have to be a human-style mouth. It can be a sine wave or any number of different ways of creating mouth movements. But it means for example that a broadcaster can create a character relatively inexpensively and be able to get that character on TV in real time.

"However the really exciting usage is the interactivity of the product. It has incredible potential in live events such as product launches, conventions, banquets, information kiosks and trade shows, right down to some rather way- out ideas we are looking into, dealing, believe it or not, with interactive cinema advertising.

"Picture yourself innocently taking your seat in a cinema to watch a movie. Suddenly, during the adverts, an animated cartoon character appears on the screen and, incredibly, begins talking directly to you. It may say something like `Hey you in the third row! Yes you, the one with the glasses eating popcorn!` and then proceed to talk directly to you and to others in the audience."

Major laughs, "Can you imaging the drawing power of any advert using this approach? The potential is limitless, and of course the first few products to go public with interactive animation will be the talk of the town and the central subject of most conversations for weeks.

Major concludes, "In our business, time is probably our most important single cost element, so any solution that can minimise wasted time and increase our productivity is good for us and for our customers. That is why I was so eager to order the new Silicon Graphics workstation. I want the very first one that arrives in the country, installed and working in our company the day it arrives."