Lo cierto es que si no ha llegado, poco le falta. Por medio de una cámara se puede interpretar los gestos y sustituir los típicos comandos /smile / point /wink que se usan para demostrar emociones en los avatares de los mundos virtuales. Realmente es una tecnología que está ya tan al alcance como la del chat de voz.
El artículo es realmente muy interesante.
Terra Nova: Is ‘Free Gesticulation’ For Avatars Here Yet?
I attended the Metaverse Roadmap workshop last week at Stanford, and I was pleased to hear Mitch Kapor touting the benefits of gestural input for virtual worlds (see Dan’s blog post). I was especially excited when he said you can (almost) buy «3D webcams» – cameras plus an infrared depth sensor – for only $39! (Not sure if he was talking about the ZCam specifically). A couple of years ago, when Richard Marks of the Sony EyeToy team visited PARC and demonstrated their «real-time motion capture» for games, he said 3D cameras still cost $20,000!
Now I don’t know if gestural interfaces will revolutionize computing in general, but I’m very excited about the new possibilities they create for 3D avatar control. As I’ve written about before, avatars will never be fully expressive until they are enabled with free gesticulation. With 3D cameras and real-time motion-capture techniques, «Players could use their own bodies and faces as joysticks in puppeteering their avatars.» Currently in MMOs, gesture and facial expression are limited to a pre-specified library of commands (/bow, /wave, /point, /smile, /wink, etc.). Imagine if text chat were like this? What if you could only send chat messages by selecting them from a pre-specified library of phrases (like chat between strangers in ToonTown)? This would be severely limiting in terms of communication and expression. However, it’s the current state of avatar gesture in virtual worlds.
In practice, free chat or voice can help compensate for this lack of free gesticulation. Take cybersex, for example, with its elaborate text descriptions of what you wish your clunky avatar could do: <Alex gently grips the nape of your neck with one hand and leans in for a kiss>. This really highlights a big gap in current avatar functionality!
Now in modeling gesture, we must recognize that not all «gestures» are the same. The canned gestures in today’s virtual worlds and MMOs work okay for certain types of gestures, but others will require free gesticulation.
Deja tu comentario