Tech, Video Games

Gamer’s Facial Expression Cloning – Next Big Thing in Gaming?29 Sep

Gamer’s Facial Expression Cloning – Next Big Thing in Gaming?

A group of researchers are reporting on a new setup, which could finally result in every facial expression made by a gamer be cloned to the avatars face. The results produced by this method are truly amazing. Commercialization of this could be a big change in multiplayer game’s immersiveness.

Immersiveness has played a significant role in games development over the recent times. Game producers have engaged every possible technique to make the gamers feel deeply involved with the game. Customization of the gaming character (avatar) is one such method, where in the gamer feels more involved when the avatar has been customized to look like him/her or to his/her liking.

Multiplayer games have taken gaming to the next level, as the gamers get to compete with real people in real time. Most multiplayer games include chat, emoticons and VOIP for letting the gamers exchange their emotions/feelings over the game. Consider one gamer wearing extra strong body armor is being shot by an enemy with a very tiny gun. Chat, emoticons or VOIP could not really carry over the expressions or emotions of these players, would it not be awesome to see the player (avatar) being shot – laughing hard in this situation. This should be possible very soon, as a group of researchers have designed a setup which makes this possible.

Sample of expressions captured from human(left) to two different avatars

Sample of expressions captured from human(left) to two different avatars

However, this process has had several bottlenecks. Human face which is non-rigid and morphological very different from that of an avatar introduces several complications. Several earlier researches focused on using one camera and achieving this. However it is almost impossible to do this, due to the excitements caused during the games, gamers move around in various directions and this produces large lateral movements of the face, which makes it difficult for a facial analysis system to track and analyze.

In the proposed setup, two cameras are installed on the edges of the screen to acquire real time images of the gamer. Whenever one camera is not able to get sufficient data (due to movement or rotation) of the face, data from the other camera is associated. A multi objective active appearance model is then used which produces data to be used in a synthetic face database. Very briefly, in the 2D frontal view of the gamer, several land marks are established and x coordinates of landmarks in the profile view are combined with it to make a 3D shape model. 2D texture of only frontal view is mapped on the 3D shape and is thus called as 2.5D AAM (active appearance model).

Gaming Facial Cloning Setup

Transforming the observed facial expression of the gamer to the avatar is made possible by a mathematical relationship between their appearances using a database which has a collection of the gamers (human) facial expression and a second database is an optimal database of synthetic facial expressions. The gamer’s facial database is built by requesting the gamer to imitate few specific facial expressions. Results got from the facial analysis in real time are then analyzed using the mathematical model and mapped to an appropriate synthetic facial expression and thus making it all possible.

The researchers report that the accuracy (as shown above) and efficiency of the proposed method have been very high, and hope that this system would not only be used in gaming but also in large events like conferences and meetings. They also propose that this system can be used as an efficient communication where the band width is limited to transmit actual video footage.

Journal Reference: Gamer’s Facial Cloning for Online Interactive Games, Abdul Sattar, Nicolas Stoiber, Renaud Seguier, and Gaspard Breton

Tech

Basic Router Configuration Tutorial15 Sep

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Routers are now appearing more and more in everyday homes. Once only part of a technicians or engineers equipment wish list, broadband is making them more and more popular.

Routers are an ideal way of managing internet access and bandwidth in households with multiple computers. They also add an extra physical barrier to intrusion over the internet too.

The most popular home router is the Linksys WRT54GS. It has been on the market for a number of years and has improved steadily. The installed firmware is efficient and pretty robust making it an ideal starter router for the budding amateur. As well as the standard firmware, there are third party, Unix based firmware which add considerably to the features of this innocuous blue box.

The router will work straight out of the box with the default configuration but none of the security features work. It will be our job to enable them straight away in order to secure your home network as much as possible.

The installation order should be, internet to modem, modem to input socket of router via network cable. The computers then connect to the four network ports on the back. Configuration is pretty straightforward, via a web interface. Access it by putting http://192.168.1.1 into your browser. The default username and password is admin.

The first screen in the overview of the network settings. We don’t need to change anything here to get things moving, as long as there is an IP address found it’s all good. If you have a wireless connection, choose the wireless tab next. If you don’t, disable the wireless and skip the next section. Just remember when you make any changes on a particular page to save them before moving on. Each will need to be saved individually or the changes will be lost.

The wireless settings are pretty straightforward, change the Wireless Network Name or SSID to something you recognize. Then set the wireless channel, ensuring you also set any devices you want to connect to with the same channel. Next comes Wireless Security where we will lock down the network. Set the Security Mode to WPA2 if your devices support it and set the Encryption to 128 bit. You can either generate a passphrase, or provide your own. Whatever you do, remember it as you will also need to add this to the wireless devices you want to use the network.

The most important of these changes is to enable the firewall. Choose the Security, then the Firewall tab and enable all of the options. Next we change the default username and password. Select the Administration tab and set it to something complicated but memorable, then disable remote management.

By following these simple steps, a user of any skill level can quickly secure their network from attack. The router can do so much more, but you are now safe enough to explore all the options you have. Despite having a hardware firewall on the router, ensure that each device connecting to the network also has a software one too, you can’t be too careful!

Tech

I bought a new computer11 May

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Here are the specs for those who care:

They didn’t send me a crossfire bridge for my graphics cards which is crap. I went ahead and ordered one from NewEgg which I shouldn’t have had to do IMO, but whatever. I went to the ByteShop in Naples and borrowed one from them until Tuesday when my other one should be here.