The Economist, January 27th, 1996
Science and Technology
Cartoon film making is not for the impatient. Every second of action requires the laborious creation of dozens of subtly distinct frames. And if you are a user of the Internet's World Wide Web, watching is tedious too -- the data in all those frames take longer to send than the film does to play through. Tomaso Poggio, a researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, aims to speed up both processes.
Dr. Poggio works with neural nets. These computer programs are designed to have a brain-like facility for recognising patterns. A neural net can learn, for instance, what a face looks like and then recognise that face from angles it has never "seen" before.
Dr. Poggio has extended this idea. His nets, if shown a face (or other object) from several angles, can not only learn it, but also reproduce it. And then they can quicken such images using standard movement patterns. A figure can be made to walk and run -- or to hop, skip and jump -- and a face to smile and frown. Animation is possible "on the fly" without the need to store lots of frames (though it does require enough processing power to run the neural net).
To exploit his invention Dr. Poggio has helped set up a company called nFX, based in Santa Clara, California. The company's neural net software will be available over the Internet and will allow a user to turn pictures on the Web into animated cartoons. To start with, nFX is setting up a "Cartoon-o-matic" page on the Web, where visitors can learn the ropes by manipulating comic characters, but in time it hopes people will use the system during on-line exchanges with each other.
A video conference could, in principle, be conducted just by sending details of a few key features such as the eyes and mouth, and having a neural net that had learned the sender's face reconstruct the ever-changing expressions at the other end. And PC-game players could take each other on as characters based on photographs of themselves. The system will also work on stills. Digitize that photograph of yourself where you blinked as the shutter clicked and Dr. Poggio's neural nets could truly be an eye-opener.
© 1996 The Economist Newspaper Group, Inc.
Reprinted with permission. Further reproduction prohibited.
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| For information about nFX: information @ nfx.com |