Saturday, August 28, 2004
Girl on monkey bars
[From Roberto Almanza] Here is a post on a pretty cool piece of work from the Microsoft folks. This is the kind of stuff that gets people excited about Microsoft. Until they discover the ways of the Empire, that is.
Michael Cohen and his colleagues at Microsoft Research have come up with techniques to take digital video like, say, stuff from a hand-held camera, and combine it with animation. In the sample video, they have produce an astonishingly convincing piece of visual magic realism. The proof, as always in computer graphics, is in the pudding. Check out the video.
Though others have turned a still image into a cartoon, turning a video into a cartoon is more challenging. "Some people say it's easy," said Cohen. "They use the technique for still images and apply it frame-by-frame. The problem is, if you do this, the images jump all over the place. The background shakes around a lot, and each frame looks like a different drawing. We want to make the video look like a normal cartoon where the motion is smooth."
Michael Cohen and his colleagues at Microsoft Research have come up with techniques to take digital video like, say, stuff from a hand-held camera, and combine it with animation. In the sample video, they have produce an astonishingly convincing piece of visual magic realism. The proof, as always in computer graphics, is in the pudding. Check out the video.
Though others have turned a still image into a cartoon, turning a video into a cartoon is more challenging. "Some people say it's easy," said Cohen. "They use the technique for still images and apply it frame-by-frame. The problem is, if you do this, the images jump all over the place. The background shakes around a lot, and each frame looks like a different drawing. We want to make the video look like a normal cartoon where the motion is smooth."
