Photoreal Digital Humans and the Promise of Virtual Reality
In less than a decade, the ability to render a photorealistic animated human face has gone from being an unfathomable challenge to something soon to be taken for granted. In this talk, I will present recent applications of the Light Stage technologies developed at the USC Institute for Creative Technologies in such movies as Furious 7, The Jungle Book, Logan, Valerian, and Rogue One, and to create a 3D portrait of President Barack Obama. I'll present new results in MultiSpectral Lighting Reproduction -- using a light stage to reproduce the color rendition effects of different illuminants, and a new techique for modeling and rendering the face's vellus hairs or "peach fuzz" from photographs. I'll also describe how Light Stage data was leveraged to create the SIGGRAPH 2017 demo "Meet Mike", which puppeteered a realistic 3D face in real time in virtual reality. I will also present a sampling of recent projects from Google Daydream.
