OC3 Entertainment, a provider of facial animation technology to the video game industry, has announced that an early version of FaceFX Live will be shown at the Game Developers Conference this month.
The product generates facial animation data in real-time using audio input from a microphone, and will be shown on an Xbox 360 at OC3 Entertainment’s booth.
"We enable gamers to communicate in a more realistic way, whether it is an integral part of the game mechanics, or simply a lobby-chat feature.” says John Briggs, Co-Founder of OC3 Entertainment. “The entire spectrum of games -- ranging from online board games to MMORPGs -- will be much more exciting with FaceFX Live.”
OC3 Entertainment will also be showing improvements to its pre-recorded facial animation solution. Version 1.5 of FaceFX is being released at the show featuring support for 7 languages, custom workspaces with 2D sliders, and new ways to share animations and setup across multiple characters. The FaceFX Live product also benefits from the improvements because the exact same content can be used to play pre-recorded and live animations.
Epic Games will also demonstrate FaceFX technology in Unreal Engine 3 at its GDC Expo Suite. “The combined power of FaceFX and Unreal Engine 3 makes it pretty clear that with the proper tools, amazing animations are not only possible, but easily achieved.” states Jamie Redmond, Co-Founder and Technical Director of OC3 Entertainment. “We are very much looking forward to hearing game developers’ reactions after seeing what Epic has done with the integrated FaceFX technology.”
