Human 2.0 into the Metaverse : Design & Development

In the history of time, humanity always wanted to create its own alter egos. It probably began from the very initial time of civilization with cave arts, Pebble/wood carved dolls and still continuing with Instagram Filters. The Point which  I wanted to portray here is humanity always wanted to present its best version to the world. In recent times, we are probably taking the biggest and most accurate step towards our alter ego perfection goal with Metaverse. It might end up with just a wrong effort or humanity’s evolution towards creating Human 2.0 into the Metaverse.

Human 2.0 into the Metaverse is one of the most essential of all its building blocks.

so, before proceeding more about Human 2.0. Let me give you a small and significant list of those building blocks.

Key Hardware Building Blocks:
IoT, 5G, Cloud Computing, AR Glasses, VR Headsets, and Gears, etc.
Key Software Building Blocks:
AI, Automation, 3D contents, and Animations, Location, Mapping, Sensor data, Simulations, etc.

Yes, I know that I have not mentioned Human 2.0 yet in this list and my reasons are very clear.

Firstly, Human 2.0 is still under development, no one can tell what should be the perfect version of it.
and Obviously, It’s going to be a combination of many of those building blocks utilized for a common goal to make our life virtual.

Tech giants like Meta (earlier known as Facebook), Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Nvidia, Autodesk are already investing huge towards it. Then comes the medium-scale and small startup companies like Roblox, Epic Games, Unity, Active Theory, Decentraland, Dapper Labs, etc.

Epic Games is one of the companies that started thinking about building Metaverse even before the conceptualization. Metaverse was already there with them and growing at a significant speed. Can you guess the name??

Epic’s court battle with apple revealed documents that show ‘Fortnite‘ alone brought more than USD 9 Billion total of Revenue in 2018 and 2019.

Now, Coming to the real tools, Many of you are aware of ‘Unreal Engine’ It’s probably the most used production level game Development engine that exists. Unreal Engine is an open-source, also it’s used in the development of Film & Media Production, eLearning Platform development, etc.

Metahuman creator is a recent add-on tool for the unreal engine built to create believable real-time High Fidel Digital Human. This cloud streamed app allows creators to shorten their month/week-long digital human creation task to hours, without compromising on quality. It does not just create a 3d model of a person but a complete digital twin which has all the skin details, facial expressions, and almost everything similar to the original person.

This research was first shown in 2018 when Chinese actress Bingjie Jiang delivered her first performance as Siren. Confusing right? See this small video to understand better.

We could also get our hands-on experience in MetaHuman Tool. Epic Games allowed us early access to explore.

Some screen records of Metahuman App

Although, the company has not yet mentioned their contribution or capabilities about the Metaverse. But, 3D animators, Game Developers, Motion work studios already know about Reallusion’s software capabilities. Their upcoming software like Iclone 8, Character Creator 4 along with Motion Live, Headshot Plugin, Skin gen Plugin is directly getting utilized towards the creation of digital humans and other Metaverse contents.

Check the cool videos below to understand more about Reallusion tools.

Some other significant Human 2.0 contributing tools which they have

Motion Live 3D: real-time motion capture and animation using camera and body sensors.
Headshot Plugin: Photo headshot to AI-based 3d head generator
Skingen Plugin: Photorealistic skin generation and detailing tools

Here is a sample image of how this design and development Pipeline works.

Although, until now I have talked about enhanced 3d design and development tools that are successfully enabling us to create digital humans. But, it still lags a major human capability, Intelligence, and responsiveness.

We need technology to bring Intelligent 3d Models, animation, Sensor data, communication data, and artificial intelligence together. That’s where the next tool or the startup comes into play.

We are not very sure if they are using either Metahuman or Reallusion to make this possible. But, Soul Machines have made very significant progress towards assembling Artificial Intelligence and Digital Humans together in a working format for use cases like Customer Experiences, Entertainment, Health Care, E-commerce, etc.

Soul Machine’s digital humans are responsive. They can listen to you, chat with you also see you. Check out their demo.

Their Digital people are empathetic and engaging in nature, they can speak up to 12 languages for now. Their Digital DNA studio allows researchers and Developers to Customize and Scale it as per their requirements. The Human OS platform with a digital brain on the cloud allows these digital humans to automatically generate new animations based on the interactions it’s getting from the opposite side.

We from FreeFlow Technologies wanted to encourage startups to lay their first footsteps into the Metaverse. The way the recent tech movements are happening. We can say that Metaverse is pretty much inevitable. So, why not start early, You can even start with building simple 2D Apps for the Metaverse. But, let’s keep that tech blog for another Sunday.