The Emily Project
"I officially pronounce that Image Metrics has finally built a bridge across the uncanny valley and brought us to the other side. "
When we first started working on Emily, our goal was to create an exact replica of the real actress Emily O'Brien. Why? Because there was no other way to determine how close we had come to reality if we did not replicate a "real" person. Judging from the reaction of people at SIGGRAPH 2008, and the hundreds of media hits, we've come pretty close to the mark.
But don't believe us. You be the judge. Click on the video to the right.
More on the Emily Project:
Image Metrics began planning the Emily project in March 2008. After Image Metrics developed a script for the animation, the ICT Graphics Lab scanned O’Brien to develop the template for her CG double. A team of eight artists working part-time on the internal project then built a custom rig for the Emily character, captured O’Brien’s performance with video and applied it to the CG character with its proprietary facial animation solution. Once the capture and rigging processes were finalized, the 90-second animation took just one week to complete.
