Tony is a Geek

Last week, I republished my "old" article on IBM developerworks as it had defaulted into "draft" mode as I hadn't kept it up to date.  So I make a few tweaks and republished it. https://developer.ibm.com/recipes/tutorials/create-a-3d-digital-human-with-ibm-watson-assistant-and-unity3d/   I then noticed that I could potentially use it for the content of an internal IBM badge for Intellectual Capital, so I applied for it and got the badge. https://www.youracclaim.com/badges/b851fb86-d554-4d56-ba80-dc37199a8b94 Then I was asked by the reviewer, James Belton, if he could publish on LinkedIn / Twitter about the article as he was genuinely impressed and was actually going to follow it himself this weekend: This got me thinking.  Maybe I should do a refresh, start again article, seeing as this article originally started life in early 2018.  I mean technology has moved on soooo much since then, hasn't it?.... .....well, apparently not!.... An internal request came u...

  Epic Games’ MetaHuman Creator lets developers create realistic digital humans within minutes Why is this relevant?  Well.....way-back-when....I was looking into having Digital Humans as an interface for things such as Chatbots etc... and to be honest, the technology was at 2 extremes.  You had the likes of Soul Machines that would ask you to part with a few million quid for an awesomelly realistic digital human interface or you could use the Open Source version that was, well, let's just say, a bit 1995 PS1 style , but it would kind of do the job. Well....now, you can create that Soul Machines level of Digital Human and not only that, you can do it pretty quickly too. I might have to go back and create a new updated developer article using the new technology. https://venturebeat.com/2021/02/10/epic-games-metahuman-creator-lets-developers-create-realistic-digital-humans-within-minutes/ https://venturebeat.com/2021/02/10/epic-games-metahuman-creator-lets-developers-cr...

As you know, I've been a bit of a fanboi over the past year for all things to do with Virtual / Digital Humans ( Avatars - yes, I said that word ) UBS has teamed up with IBM and avatar biometrics outfit FaceMe to build two "animated digital assistants", which will now be tested over three months. CHECK OUT the original article here: https://www.finextra.com/newsarticle/32350/ubs-puts-digital-clone-of-chief-investment-officer-in-branch What is of more interest to me is what technology is being used to make/render the Digital Humans. Enter (another) New Zealand based Digital company - ( it makes you wonder if all these companies originally did work on Lord Of the Rings or other similar movies and are now switching all that knowledge to this area? just a theory ) Anyway, here's another quick video showing the general offering from the FaceMe company .

Okay, so you may have noticed that recently, I made a 3D Avatar / Digital Human using the Unity 3D engine and connected it up to the IBM Watson SDK . Well, straight after doing that piece of work, I thought...hmmm... I also have the Unreal Engine installed on my laptop too, I wonder if there is an IBM Watson SDK sample app that could use that engine to do what I did above... A quick DuckDuckGo search later and yep, here is a gitHub . A quick 50,000ft difference check is - what are you more comfortable writing your code in? C# from Microsoft (Unity) or C/C++ (Unreal Engine) What have you had more experience in using? So, why am I pointing this out?  Well, I happened to stumble over a Digital Human that is created and controlled by the Unreal Engine....and well, it's pretty awesome! My Unity / "couple of days" effort project versus this (probably) quite a few £££££ effort doesn't really compare - but what it does show is that this level of technology and ef...