Like Slinkies and Silly Putty originating from flubbed technology, some of the cooler Web services have originated from tech originally intended for government agencies.
BigStage is definitely one of those services. It uses three photos of your face to map your features onto a virtual head using technology developed for the CIA. Your magic head is rendered into various scenes from popular movies, television shows, and digital shorts--including clips from The A-Team. You can then send those clips to your friends, parents, and relatives to be thoroughly confused and/or entertained by your shenanigans.
The service was originally demoed at both CES and the Under the Radar conference back in June, and made its formal public launch earlier Wednesday. I gave it a spin this afternoon and it managed to transfer shots of my face into what the service calls an "@ctor" in about a minute. After it's done mapping you can tweak various appearance elements from a rather simplistic Flash-based editing tool. I found it to be maddening in that it makes you scroll through each set of sunglasses, hairdos, and accessories page by page. After using something like Spore's Creature Creator, it feels decidedly old-school.
You can save each set of customizations as its own @ctor, each of which can be inserted into video clips with a single click. You can make changes to your character on the fly and see them updated live. To share a video it has to first render you in, which takes about three minutes, although the link to send it to someone else is immediately available.
Another company that's doing this is Gizmoz with its "be a star" feature. The big difference is that BigStage has a much wider range of clips from popular TV content whereas Gizmoz has a small selection of original content and music videos. That said, there is a downside; you must first install a small piece of software to use BigStage, and it only works with PCs running Windows XP or Vista.
I've embedded a sample clip using my face below. If you're having trouble seeing it you can also check it out on this page.
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.--The Web has come a long way. The aesthetic of a site can oftentimes determine whether or not a wary user will dig deeper and explore your site. The four companies below offer some of the most beautiful products shown off Tuesday at the Under the Radar social media and entertainment conference, but are they really useful? For the most part, yes. Read more about them below.
Animoto, one of my colleague Elinor Mills' favorite slideshow tools and as CEO Brad Jefferson calls it "The end of the slideshow" (in the boring, stodgy sense, of course). Jefferson says he's seen a large amount of users taking advantage of its premium services, which offer the capability to create full-length videos as opposed to the 30-second clips that free members get. In the future, the company is moving toward offering artists and companies a branded player and tools for users to create videos that involve products, songs, TV shows, and feature-length films.
Previous coverage:
Animoto adds personal music videos to Facebook
Video-creation service Animoto has lit my fire
Can Animoto make you the next Spielberg?
Michael Galpert, the co-founder of Aviary, a Web-based photo editor we've covered several times here on Webware (see link dump below) showed off the service's latest layer tracking technology (video here).
Galpert only had six minutes to talk about the suite of Web-based graphics tools, but managed to throw in a mention about an upcoming vector-based editing tool akin to Adobe Illustrator. He also announced a 3D modeling tool that will take advantage of its sister-service that lets users create complex textures. Galpert didn't reveal the names of the two forthcoming apps, but said that a less confusing name convention was on the way.
Previous coverage:
Aviary's creative suite is more than a pretty Flash app
Flash apps are taking over--Phoenix is the latest proof
Web-based multimedia suite Aviary invites beta testers
BigStage is a 3D avatar service that puts together a rendered head based on three photographs it takes with your Webcam. It'll figure out your bone structure, how much your nose sticks out, and how large your ears are.
Co-founder Jonathan Strietzel's demo of the face maker reminded me a lot of Gizmoz, which does the same thing, except with Big Stage you can make live changes to your avatar in moving video clips and pictures and see the changes reflected right away.
The site is opening up with pictures in two months, and a version that integrates live videos about six months later. Strietzel thinks the future of the technology will be tie-ins with social networks to pull in faces from your buddy lists to make adjoining advertisements more targeted with rendered 3D heads of your friends. Creepy.
Previous coverage: CIA technology will map your face
Overlay.TV is a company that's doing something very similar to VideoClix.TV (see coverage). It'll link up the items, people, or subject matter that are found in videos to online stores so people can buy or get more information on what they're watching. Some of the demos I've seen of competing products are incredibly engaging, albeit a far cry from the virgin, ad-free purity of what's seen on most video sites.
What makes Overlay.TV interesting is that it's going for both media creators and consumers. It's got a Facebook app that lets you tag up your videos. It also works with over a dozen popular hosts like YouTube, MySpace.com, and Yahoo Video.
That's the end of the conference sessions for the day. Stay tuned for the fireside chat about how start-ups can get noticed among all the noise from competitors.
BigStage founder Jonathan Strietzel mugs in front of Steven Harwell's avatar.
(Credit: Rafe Needleman / CNET)LAS VEGAS-- Intel CEO Paul Otellini's CES keynote was sparkling. In contrast to Bill Gates' pastel portrait of the future, Otellini presented a concrete vision of a personal, reactive Web, and the challenges to creating it (Silicon, Infrastructure, Context, and Interface). For a full rundown, see Dan Farber's writeup on ZDNet.
Intel loves where the Web is going. The more interactive and personal it gets, the more processing power is required and the more new chips Intel sells, for both servers and local workstations. The most interesting (and newest) product that Otellini brought to the stage in his keynote was an automatic avatar builder made by BigStage.
BigStage creates a model of anyone's head by using just three photos--head-on, rotated a little, and rotated a little more. The company processes these pictures on its own servers and ends up with a model that knows which pixels your eyes are (so it can move and blink them), where your mouth is, and so it. In the Intel keynote demo, BigStage found Jonathan Strietzel created an avatar of Smash Mouth singer Steven Harwell. It was eerily good--much better and less creepy than avatars I've seen previously.
The technology comes from a CIA-funded project at the University of California. It was originally intended for scanning surveillance cams, since at its core it measures the three-dimensional geometry of key points on a face, for example between eyes, or the shape of a person's cheekbone. The fact that the algorithm can extract a complete 3D model from only three images, and with what is now reasonably inexpensive computation (this is where Intel comes in) is what makes it commercially viable.
BigStage hosts the avatars and is looking at several ways to get them out onto the Web, to populate the virtual world with facsimiles of real people, instead of the cartoons that live there now. People will likely be able to create widgets of themselves that they can embed on blogs and social networks, and perhaps in existing virtual worlds like Second Life and gaming networks like Xbox Live. The company is also doing deals with brands and music labels. Strietzel told me that a big public product will be available that lets users put their mug in the "most popular music video of all time." (Thriller, right?)
I hope the company delivers on its demo. Look for public examples of BigStage technology in April or May.
View complete CES 2008 coverage from CNET.
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