The realistic avatar we’ve all been waiting for
Imagine a digital human that looks just like you and can convey the same emotions as you do in the real world. Based in Portugal, Didimo, the company behind the EU-funded project bearing the same name, Didimo (Humanity in Digital Communication), specialises in the creation of such high-fidelity digital humans in a field otherwise dominated by avatars that often lack authenticity and nuance. The company specifically looked into the issues of virtual shopping and virtual meetings. “In virtual (clothes) shopping, consumers usually need to answer two questions: does this look good on me and does this fit me? Virtual try-on applications could have been a solution, but they failed because of two trade-offs. Firstly, consumers are instructed to make an avatar that looks like them but often misses or oversimplifies important personal attributes. Secondly, very few systems can accurately gauge user-specific body size, shape and nuance, which means that consumers can only select the generic body shape that’s the closest to their own,” says Jim Franzen, director of Marketing at Didimo. Users of avatar-based virtual meetings don’t fare any better. Not only do the usually cartoonish avatars look nothing like the real person, but these systems don’t offer high-fidelity facial and emotional representation of the user despite it being key to fruitful human interaction. As Franzen notes: “If I want to show that I am happy, I have to make my character jump up and down. Or do the boogie. But in real life, I have never done those things at a real business meeting!”
A selfie and you’re all set
Convinced that more realistic and emotionally accurate digital representations would be much more effective and engaging, Didimo created a Cloud-based platform and support tools to generate lifelike digital humans. Using this platform, anyone can generate a fully 3D representation of themselves – a didimo – from a photo or selfie in just 90 seconds. “This is a real breakthrough,” Veronica Orvalho, CEO and founder of Didimo, explains. “No more arbitrary choices or generic options to choose from: users automatically receive an avatar that looks just like them. We are already excellent at generating faces and heads and we are working on bodies, trying to bring high accuracy to 1:1 digital human generation.” EU support under the SME instrument helped the company establish their ethics and responsibility policies, which can hardly be ignored when creating a technology that builds digital humans. The grant also helped the technical team in the development of Didimo’s core patented API technology, retail and mobile product. “Support under Horizon 2020 has helped strengthen our brand and commercialisation process. We could build complex use cases and test the potential of the technology with early adopters,” says Franzen. As they aimed to build a scalable solution for various situations, Didimo worked closely with the likes of Amazon, Sony, Altice, Ceek, Soliel, Atom Republic and others to create robust solutions for their needs. “As a B2B provider, we want to provide our customers with a turnkey solution. We offer a cloud-based platform with API, SDKs, documentation and other support services to make this easy for them. Didimo’s core services are fully scalable and designed to be embedded in an ongoing business application or site. We are particularly focusing on the gaming, fashion retail, communications and XR industries,” Franzen adds. Didimo has secured two patents in the United States and has more pending approval. With COVID-19 skyrocketing digital adoption rates to heights not even the most optimistic projections could have seen coming – or at least not so suddenly – the technology certainly presents a huge potential for growth. More importantly, it finally addresses a basic human need that is often missing from digital interactions today: authentic human expression and connection.
Keywords
Didimo, virtual, avatar, realistic, digital human