It’s a wrap! Huge thanks to Epic Games for hosting and featuring MVNT to one of the greatest conference of all time. Unreal Fest this year felt more like a future preview for the interactive entertainment. Perhaps its like Epic’s manifesto of metaverse infrastructure. Here are my takeaways:
- 𝐔𝐧𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐥 𝐄𝐧𝐠𝐢𝐧𝐞 𝐥𝐞𝐚𝐝𝐬 𝐝𝐢𝐠𝐢𝐭𝐚𝐥 𝐚𝐯𝐚𝐭𝐚𝐫 𝐜𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧
MetaHuman and animation related agenda took nearly 25% of the total sessions this year. At the same time, mega IP collabs were announced by Epic – from the Simpsons to Disney. This implies that Unreal Engine envisions to be the next gold standard for digital avatars creation where creators can more easily create, expand, and distribute under IP-safeguarded environment. Imagine thousands of creators recreating their own fortnite islands with official Disney characters. Tech Infra and distribution all at once. what an ecosystem!
- 𝐌𝐞𝐭𝐚𝐇𝐮𝐦𝐚𝐧 𝐚𝐬 𝐧𝐞𝐰 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐒𝐌𝐏𝐋
High-quality animation is super essential for high-quality avatar content creation. Cool avatars mean nothing if they move sloppy. With no surprise, Michael J. Black pulled up with a real-time video-to-metahuman retargetter – like Meshcapade but in Metahuman.
I can imagine SMPL to be upgraded to MetaHuman quality with free-for-all accessibility. Motion generation was the one of the most challenging area in AI but with Meshcapade team in Epic we can now expect the gold standard for high quality SMPL. Everyone will be able to be like CodeMiko with their camera. easier than ever.
- 𝐏𝐫𝐨-𝐀𝐈 𝐜𝐨𝐦𝐞𝐬 𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡 𝐩𝐫𝐨-𝐜𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐭𝐨𝐫𝐬 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐩𝐫𝐨-𝐜𝐨𝐩𝐲𝐫𝐢𝐠𝐡𝐭
What I love about Tim and Epic are their value for licensing and copyright. They would only reveal if the AI is ethically trained and proved useful. For instance, Fab has successfully established creator ecosystem with its rapid organic grow credits to their creator support!
Copyright is often overlooked in AI these days. But if kept well, it makes the ecosystem sustainable and grow. Epic really understood the assignment and showed an example. Epic’s responsibility and strong safeguard policies will make them more open to more developers/creators and business partners.
- 𝐌𝐕𝐍𝐓’𝐬 𝐜𝐨𝐧𝐭𝐫𝐢𝐛𝐮𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐭𝐨 𝐄𝐩𝐢𝐜
Our ethos of building dance AI aligns with Epic’s vision of making digital avatar contents more fun and accessible. Given high quality tools, users would create high quality contents. We’ve always wanted to share the joy of dance by being the world’s tool for dance content creation. Imagine CLO Virtual Fashion for dance, Tripo AI for dance, or Suno for dance – it was our debut showcase!
We would have never imagined of sharing a session in Unreal Fest one year back from now. Huge thanks to Epic Games Korea, Ohchan Kwon, MegaGrant team and Fab team to make this possible. We will go through more upgrades and share new groundbreaking contributions e in the upcoming Unreal Fest Seoul in August. See you soon! 🇰🇷🕺
Original article from Joon’s LinkedIn
