On October 3 at the Elevate Festival in Toronto, Ubisoft, through its research and development group Ubisoft La Forge, unveiled a new research project with the University of Toronto and York University. The project will aim to transform the field of 4D digital human capture and rendering using an emerging artificial intelligence (AI) technique known as “implicit representations”.
For players, it has the potential to improve the level of immersion felt when playing video games. While developers may benefit from reducing tedious workloads, so they can focus on other aspects of digital avatars, like movement, design, and more.
This collaboration will be led by University of Toronto Professors David Lindell and Kyros Kutulakos, York University Professor Kosta Derpanis, and Ubisoft La Forge Principal Research Scientist Marc-André Carbonneau.
“Working with the University of Toronto and York University on this project is a unique opportunity to bring together our pools of expertise, experiences and tools to improve the creation process for digital avatars,” said Yves Jacquier, Executive Director of Ubisoft La Forge. “Implicit representations offer exciting possibilities when it comes to making games, including more realistic and efficient character modeling, while removing some of the tedious work for developers that’s often part of the process.”
As leading institutions in computer science and artificial intelligence, the University of Toronto and York University will bring their world-class research capabilities to this joint endeavor. Together, researchers will investigate real-time applications, including video games, virtual reality and film production.
“This partnership represents an exciting opportunity to push the boundaries of how we reconstruct and render digital humans—our work will push the realism of character movement, facial expressions, and emotional nuances beyond current capabilities,” said David Lindell, Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto. “We look forward to collaborating with Ubisoft La Forge on groundbreaking research.”
“Digital humans are crucial in video games, where characters exist entirely within virtual worlds. This project is a unique collaboration between academia and industry, aimed at advancing the state of the art in capturing digital humans and enhancing the essential details of human appearance and motion that are crucial for preserving player immersion,” said Kosta Derpanis, Associate Professor at York University. “Furthermore, this partnership will provide valuable training for the next generation of computer vision researchers. We are excited to get started!”
Improving the video game experience through increased immersion could have significant impact in Canada, where roughly 53 per cent of people report gaming regularly, and where the video games industry contributed roughly $5.5 billion to GDP in 2021.
This project with the University of Toronto and York University builds on Ubisoft La Forge’s academic partnerships to drive AI innovation in the gaming industry, and follows the creation of Ubisoft-Mila research Chair on Scaling Game Worlds with Responsible AI last year.
