Liveblogging the Metaverse Roadmap Project: Big Stage Entertainment

Avi Bar-Zeev says one of his unique qualifications is that he’s worked on both Second Life and Google Earth. Of course, he’s also working for Big Stage Entertainment, which recently demoed facial recognition technology with Intel at CES, as Principal Architect, User Created Content.

“I’m just trying to work on interesting technologies now,” he said. “Find something interesting and then give it 10-15 years, and it’ll get there.”

The things that haven’t gotten there, though, are avatars. He introduced John Snoddy, CTO of Big Stage, to demo its avatar models.

He showed off a 3D model of himself, rendered in real time, that looked pretty fantastic.

“The model’s far from perfect,” he said. “But anybody can do it with any digital camera anywhere.”

He says the company is looking to launch the first application in a few months.

He then showed a reel from Pirates of the Carribean with Jerry Paffendorf layered over both Jeremy Irons and Johnny Depp—and then a prostitute. There’s a definite uncanny valley, but it’s pretty exciting looking.

It takes about a half-day to create a :45 second piece. That’s doing the face tracking manually, and Snoddy said the company is working on automating the process now. He expects it to eventually take about  one hour to create :30 of material.

The company, Snoddy says, is doing deals with pretty much anyone who wants to work with it, from movies to old TV shows to vanity pieces from individuals.

It should get easier in the future as he sees content creators adding the markers in during the actual development process.

As far as other engines go, Snoddy says the company is racing as fast as it can and is just getting rolling on creating additional options for users.

(See our previous coverage of Big Stage with a discussion on taking its avatars to virtual worlds here.)