May 15, 2017 Bridging the gap between the physical and digital worlds
The physical and digital worlds are growing ever more entwined. We talk to virtual assistants as if we know them. We immerse ourselves in gaming environments that are almost tangibly realistic. We buy, sell, and recommend almost every good or service in the commercial world through online marketplaces, exchanges, and eCommerce sites. Yet, the gap between the physical and virtual world still remains. Virtual assistants are unembodied and video conferencing is still fraught with Max Headroom-like deficiencies. We still need to suspend our disbelief to enter virtual worlds. And, our online purchases are still complicated by suboptimal ways of assuring the right size, fit, or personalization.
Body Labs provides a key element for bridging this remaining gap, and it’s as simple as using the camera as the portal between those worlds. From photos or videos, we can accurately, automatically, and cheaply extract human body shape, pose, and motion and recreate it in a digital environment. This is the human body as a digital platform. It enables applications across countless vertical markets to incorporate accurate human shape and motion to bring ourselves or others into the digital world in a fundamentally better and different way.
The most obvious set of applications are in the apparel world. This runs all the way from design and manufacturing through retail sales. Through providing a comprehensive understanding of a brand’s target customers’ shapes and motions we enable a company to design better fitting clothing. And, through enabling a brand to place accurate recreations of prototypical consumers into a computer-aided design (CAD) program for digitally designing clothing, we can drastically cut the expenses associated with producing physical samples and materially shorten the manufacturing cycle. More importantly, enabling a consumer to have his or her 3D body model as part of their online digital ID opens up long sought after capabilities such as accurate size recommendations, shape-based reviews, recommendations, and virtual try-on.
Apparel, gaming, AR, VR, autonomous vehicles, health, and fitness are but a few of the markets in which Body Labs’ technology is driving rapid changes. For example, from a simple video we can accurately and automatically extract the subject’s motion. This ‘markerless mocap’ has been a holy grail of sorts for the animation, gaming, and visual effects markets. Now, a gamer can have his or her moves performed by an all-star athlete. And, inversely, we can place the gamer’s avatar in the game and have he or she play the way the all-stars play.
In the autonomous driving world, simple bounding boxes aren’t sufficient to understand what a human is actually doing. Comprehending the meaning of human gestures, gazes, and motions is critical to enabling a computer-controlled vehicle to operate safely and effectively.
Likewise, for AR and VR to truly be satisfying, we will need to place ourselves and others in those worlds in ways that both the computer and ourselves understand. We need realistic, accurate human bodies and motions for the interactions to be satisfying. We need to control devices and handle objects in the same way we do in the physical world. This is only possible through the recreation of ourselves via a body model.
And, of course, a digital Doppelganger allows us to measure accurately and consistently how our shape changes or could change with a diet or exercise regime. Our shape may correlate with a predisposition to certain diseases or injuries. Being able to visualize and predict how age, exercise, or diet may impact our shape is now beginning to be possible through our ability to create an accurate 3D digital body model.
There are numerous technologies that are maturing and coalescing to bridge the gap between the physical and virtual. CAD, robotics, 3D printing, speech recognition, computer vision, and AI are all maturing in ways that bring them together. Our body model is that key technology that keeps us at the center of both of those worlds.