Scanning your likeness into a game

Wolf3D are a company who can make in-game avatars just from one selfie, and the character ends up looking exactly like you! But with improvements they say… I’d get my character to wear sunglasses all the time because I think that’s cool, what would you have? Well because of the recent announcement of games like Cyberpunk 2077 which features a video game version of Keanu Reeves, and Death Stranding which has the legendary Norman Reedus from the Walking Dead as the lead character, how good is this sort of technology, and what will it be used for in the future? Timmu Toke founder of Wolf3D... told Chris Berrow how they create an avatar!

Timmu - We have super high quality database and now we're just using deep learning to predict based on a single photo with your 3D face it's gonna look like what you think people nowadays especially want to have their likenesses in games because you know historically it just wasn't possible to do this kind of thing you know be truly represented. I think people actually don't want to have exactly that likeness. They want to have kind of a version of themselves like a better version of themselves. Like their social media profiles. If you're comparing you want it to be something that you could recognize just as yourself but you also want to have the customization and the ability to edit it and stylized it. So it's kind of an ideal version of herself. I think you know people naturally already have very tight connections with their game characters. But but having your own likeness they're recognizing you as a version of herself would only increase that.

Chris - There's a lot of big games that are coming out very soon. Like for example Death Stranding where basically you know celebrities and actors and you know big big names are being put into games and then their voice is being used in the game as well. You've got essentially what looks like them acting in your game. Do you think that this is the way the games are going nowadays that the big names can actually lend quite a lot to a game. Would you think it's a strange move at this stage.

Timmu - Yeah I mean sure it is. It feels like a two way to go like in a more interactive way with the celebrities who are you know through our screens from you know movies and so forth. It feels like a natural way. It becomes easier to bring them into the experiences then. Then why not. And actually actors have been scanned and kind of digitized for decades already. It's kind of Ethnology in Hollywood has existed for a while but it just requires a lot of hardware a lot of scanners and a lot of manual labour.