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Avatar Me: Photorealistic Quake Skins 173

Posted by CmdrTaco from the reskin-the-bots-to-be-your-boss dept.
Polaris writes "A British company is demoing some really cool tech at the Millennium Dome: you can get yourself scanned and uploaded into a Quake (or other) game (well, just an avatar of you, but a pretty good one at that.) Screenshots are available!" This is vastly simpler then trying to fit yourself into your buddies' flat bed scanner.
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AvatarMe:Photorealistic Quake Skins More

AvatarMe:Photorealistic Quake Skins

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  • I did it! (Score:4)

    by Signal 11 ( 7608 ) on Thursday June 15, 2000 @07:12AM (#999907)
    First they put an apple on the scanner, and then it disappeared, so then, like, I stepped up, and it digitized me. But now the world looks alot lower resolution (like, 800x166 at 16 bit!), and I'm glowing blue! What's worse, the games I play aren't ANYTHING like quake - I'm riding around in a motorcycle and playing discus! What's the fun in THAT?!
  • This may go without saying, but I think that this kind of technique will find much greater life on the communications venue. Now that the ability to create a photorealistic Avatar of yourself has been created, the logical next step is to move forward to create chat rooms or other places where people communicate with each other in an OOC context where people may actually care about what you look like in real life. Photorealistic Quake III skins are cool, but nothing beyond that... I wouldn't be surprised if one of the Avatar chats that already exists tries to get their hands on this.
  • I'm willing to say most people here would enjoy it more than a screenshot of you in a G-string :)
  • This is *just* what we need.

    Bear with me:

    "Oh, it's all their fault, playing Doom made them kill their classmates!"

    "But Doom didn't have realistic human targets."

    ...

    See where I'm headed? Now Q3A *has* realistic human targets.

    Bill Gates, anyone? (Sorry -- I just had to.)

    --
    "Give him head?" ... "Be a beacon?"

    "One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft Ad
  • What Java demo ? It's not an applet but an Active X control ! Didn't you get the "do you trust this content" crap dialog ?

    It doesn't work on Netscape (of course) but on IE, the link is this ...

    http://www.avatarme.com/download/example1.htm

    The speed is probably slow because of downloading all that data, or they might have a crappy viewer with software only rendering ...
  • I am so delighted with your description of NHS that I will encourage my elected representatives to enact it here in the States!

    I think you ought to. That way, you won't have medical staff checking your pockets for medical insurance documents when you arrive unconcious and bleeding at the A&E... Or be put second in line to someone with a small cut when you're critical condition, just because they're insured and you're not...

    "wonderful, equal, free government supported health care systems of Europe".

    Actually, I _do_ live there. And some of the state healthcare systems are _really_ good.
    At least, when Europeans do finally get to hospital, then they are there until they're cured or dead, as opposed to when the insurance runs out... An Oregon friend of mine's Dad was sent home to die of stomach cancer once his insurance cash ran out...
    The NHS is an excellent system, but it needs cash, badly. I'd gladly pay an extra 10% tax on my grossly inflated earnings, if that was what it took. Sadly, now that the age of conviction politics has given way to soundbite politics, that will never happen.

    Strong data typing is for those with weak minds.

  • It's a good focal point for the millenial celebrations (even if they did get the date wrong...)

    They got the date exactly right. All the idiots who don't understand the millenium dates got their show when they wanted and all us wingeing cynics will get to see it closed at the end of this millenium.

  • Uh - not that I know of.
    What the hell is a milliard?

  • Re:Dome Heads! (Score:3)

    by GregWebb ( 26123 ) on Thursday June 15, 2000 @09:25AM (#999915)
    Oh well. I _liked_ it. The central show is impressive - even if the story's not any good. The Blackadder's worth seeing. That huge RC airship is _so_ cool that I really want one. The body zone's dull but that's not all there is to it! I can't remember the exact names but I enjoyed the transport, earth, that one with the huge kid and the IR cameras, plus that funky flying saucer thing where you're going into the earth.

    It's definitely worth going to. It's a good focal point for the millenial celebrations (even if they did get the date wrong...) and it wasn't that expensive. IIRC £780 Million, which buys a _lot_ less than you'd think. Next time you see a government announcement, look at how much any of these wonderful new initiatives cost. Anything significant normally costs several _Billion_ pounds.

    Stop being a killjoy and enjoy it.
  • Okay, I know it seems to be fashionable to flame sig11 around here, but I gotta say I kind of liked Tron.

    From the film-junkie perspective, it was an interesting update of Metropolis, changing it from an industrial age horror story to an information age one.

    From the geek perspective, it was one of Hollywood's better attempts at capturing the hacker ethos. (Jeff Bridges even uses the term "hacking" in a manner that ESR would approve of.)

    Compared to eye-gougingly bad movies like Hackers and Virtuosity, it was a triumph.

  • I thought you brits used the million->milliard->billion system instead of the million->billion->trillion system?

    Most people have given up on trying to preserve the binary system (thousand = 1000 ^ 1, million = 1000 ^ 2, billion = 1000 ^ 4, trillion = 1000 ^ 8) and switched to the American unary version (1000 ^ [1, 2, 3, 4]). That's a shame, because the English version covers a wider range of numbers with less redundancy (compare binary vs unary numbers).

    However I still wouldn't use 'billion' or 'trillion' because it's ambiguous. You can say 'milliard' for 1000 ^ 3 but that sounds a bit archaic. Best to use computer-style suffixes, eg £5G is 5 milliard pounds.

    And you'd better not even mention 'kilobytes' :-)
  • A milliard is a kind of duck.
  • What part of running around and attacking photorealistic representations of other humans do you NOT find to be appalling?

    Maybe the transition was so slow you didn't notice. First, we were shooting alien ships. Second, we ate monsters. Third, we started shooting the aliens themselves. Then, we started shooting people, but they were "zombie" people so it was OK. At long last, here we are running around, hunting photorealistic simulations of people for the kill. Where do we progress from here?

    How far removed is this from Columbine? I can see this as fodder for both JonKatz and ESR. Katz wouldn't dare upset his geek readers with that notion, and ESR could look to it as an example of why EVERYONE should be armed at all times. Ugh, maybe I'm just sick and tired of hearing about Quake and other shoot-em-ups. How much longer will one have to wait before Richard Smallman gets the idea of making a Quake clone called YAFPS?

  • GOOD NEWS FOR NO US QUAKE PLAYERS (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Great. Now those 2 ton yanks will be easier to shoot as their characters will be 8 feet wide.
  • Actually, the common rabble used off the shelf avatars (Brandies were the female, can't remember the male). The techno-elite used slick custom models. That is the distinction which sets them apart. The deal with facial expressions was that only two people in the entire meta-verse could have accurate facial expressions. Juanita used Hiro and herself as models for all Avatars facial expressions. As such, she feels that Hiro and herself are the only two people in the entire meta-verse who can have genuine interaction.
  • For some real fun scanning your face, start with your left cheek on the scanner

    Yep, been there, done that. For some more fun, try keeping your head perfectly still, and moving your eyes. Start with them looking in one direction, and change them as the scanner goes past your nose. Perfect for that Marty Feldman look...

  • Not being a Quaker I might not have any idea, but don't you have to download other people's skins in order to see them yourself? Or is that just how Half-Life works?
  • I'm gonna get my scan done in the nude, that should scare everyone off.

    'cept my glasses won't be what's really big ;)

  • If you can't tell the difference between fantasy and reality maybe you shouldn't be playing violent videgames. I'm not one to take the 'games cause bad things' position, but a responsible person should know how sensitive they are and make the decision to participate or not to participate instead of just some general moralizing.
  • The more advanced FPS's get the more they become like the Photon game from the 80's with the slight difference that the out of shape and obese can run as fast as anyone else.
  • Nobody on a public server will see the skin that you spent so much time creating, unless they go and download it. And nobody will go and download everyone's personal skins because of bandwidth and storage restrictions, as well as the fear of having to stare at a naked guy with a railgun running around.

    So I think this will be great fun, but only for a private network with your buddies.

  • I know which way I look (most of the time, but I have to admit, sometimes in the morning I look into the mirror and say to myself: "Hey! I don't know who you are, but I brush your teeth anyway."). And I don't see myself in the game, so I think it isn't worth it.

    But if someone finds out how I manage to get my boss scanned this way, hey, I'll do it...

  • I agree, but I wonder if AvatarMe, or the functionality of Quake 3 is to blame for the poor mapping, and the blur?

  • As in, if you're really fat, can you not fit through/get stuck in doors? It'd be a blast playing multiplayer in a fat arena - everybody gets skins from here [fatchicksinpartyhats.com] and goes crazy. Imagine all the gibs...
  • Unfortunately, Slashdot does not allow <strike></strike> tags in postings, so I don't have an alternative to using ^H^H^H's.
    --
  • Someone tries to get a skin of their boss/co-workers? Keep this technology away from USPS workers!
  • I think the idea is that you'd use this for multiplayer games, so when you saw your buddy down the hall, it'd really be your buddy down the hall.

    I'd like to see Jar-Jar too. ;-)

    --

  • Interesting, I at first did not catch the meaning of the ^H because I am TOO OLD a geek.

    I know that the backspace is a HEX 08 which can also be accessed by doing a control h key combination on the keyboard.

    I then saw that the control charactor is represented by the carrot "^" symbol which is something I remember seeing before.

    The following explanation assumes that the least significant bit is on the right.

    For those who might care the H is the eigth charactor of the alphabet and the reason control h gives you a HEX 08 is because the control key masks out the binary bit number 7 of the combination.

    The masking makes the binary 0101000 a binary 0001000. The shift key also does the same thing to bit number 6, it toggles bit six from 1 to 0 assuming you are starting out with a lower case h. As such a captial H is 0101000. A lower case h is 0110100. A back space is of course 0001000.

    This can be discerned by looking at an ascii code chart.

    So by a very round-a-bout path I saw that the meaning was to erase by way of destructive backspace the word or phrase directly before the series of ^H's.

    It is quite funny how techy things get used and the original reasoning is not remembered or valued.

  • Being 6' 2" tall and weighing in at a whopping 140 lbs, I take extreme offense to that comment. :-)

  • And could we get customized weapons skins? As in, could I skin the railgun, make it look like I'm carrying around a wombat instead wildly firing projectiles out of its butt?

    You can already customize weapon models and skins in Quake II (I haven't played Q3A)...

  • What is far more likely to happen is somebody will someday commit a crime on camera and get away with it, because their lawyer will discredit the footage as being too easy to fake.

    This is why audio tape is not really evidence unless a witness testifies under oath that it is correct.

    (Yea yea... IANAL.)

  • ... what are the chances of getting Asia Carrera to quit making those silly UT skins and head to the Dome!?

    -- RLJ

    yes folks, that's humor

  • Another fun thing to do is scan your hand, but move it with the light as the scanning head crosses it.

    You can make 12" long fingers. (-:
  • ftp://ftp.dailyradar.com/movies/pc/halo_e3_preview _hires.mpg

    omfg!!

  • No, you don't understand! He's not writing IT as in the acronym for Information Technology, he's writing IT ("it" in all caps) as in the giant pulsating brain that controls the planet Camazotz. He's under IT's control!


    ---
    Zardoz has spoken!
  • I want ultrasound done on my insides so when I see my heart and liver bouncing across the floor after being fragged they look like my heart and liver :)
  • The Dome is no different from any other major attraction (Alton Towers, Chessington etc. etc.) if you go there at peak times then you're gonna have to queue. My advice FWIW is to go in the mid-late afternoon. By 5pm the place is only 1/4 full, and you can get on all the attractions no problems. The Dome is open until 11pm.

    I thought the Body Zone was overrated, but interesting.. My favourite zone was the Relaxation zone - well worth a visit.

    As for all the moaners going on about how the money could have been spent better elsewhere, well the same could be said for any money that is not spent on a) Hospitals or b) Schools.

    IMHO the *REAL* reason that the dome has had nothing but bad publicity is that on NYE there were hundreds of journalists who had to wait outside in the rain. From that point on there has been a vendetta in the media against the dome and the people involved in it.

    The british media effectively run this country, and are trying to ruin everything that ordinary british people should be able to enjoy. A case in point is the recent eclipse. In the event, it was less than spectacular due to the inclement weather that the UK is reknowned for. However for weeks before, the press and other media were predicting "CHAOS" in west england. This was utter bollocks events were cancelled, due to poor ticket sales - a direct result of the negative publicity.

    Don't let the media ruin the dome for you. Check it out and make up your own mind.

    Cheers

    Dady FP
  • A millard is a kind of duck

    That would be a mallard. Daffy Duck is a mallard, 1000 x 10*3 is a millard...
    So how about a millard mallards? ;p

    DJ Warble

  • When Quake first came out, my friends and I got a hold of a digital camera, shot several views of ourselves, and played quake with those altered skins. It was a lot of fun. It's kind of a fun thing if you are

    A) Addicted to Quake.
    B) Want to do it.
    C) Have an afternoon to blow with some kids, and don't want to give them beer ;-)
  • To quote Shaft, "You damn right." ;-)

    The Divine Creatrix in a Mortal Shell that stays Crunchy in Milk

  • Maybe....or how about a scan of the ATF agent and the guy that was holding Elian in the picture?
    Hmm...or how about some type of capture the flag where Elian is the flag?

    That would be so cool! Elian is the flag, Janet Reno, Marileysis, Lazaro, the fisherman dude, the dad, and Fidel Castro could be avatars!
  • Like in the movie TRON [tronmovie.com].

    Then I can take on the MPAA^H^H^H^H MCP and beat it at it's own game...
    --
  • This reminds me of an amusing anecdote:

    Since people who *are* suits don't necessarily actually wear them anymore, a new label is needed.

    My favorite candidate is 'ITS' for 'Ironed T-Shirts', as these type of people tend to iron their t-shirts and jeans (just can't relax).

    Besides, then we can call them 'its'!
    --
  • ...with doom.

    I used a hand-held scanner and snanned a picture of my face.
    Then got one of those patches like the energizer bunny rabbit, but this one bent over and shot flames out it's butt.
    Then I used an editor to comine my face to all the pictures then installed the patch.
    It was a total hoot.
  • I thought I was being accurate not funny...damn...I guess I just gotta be more accurate in the future!

  • Leisure Suit Larry??? (Score:3)

    by JimTheta ( 115513 ) on Thursday June 15, 2000 @07:00AM (#999952) Homepage
    On a completely unrelated topic (ok, no), do they still make LSL games?

    -JimTheta
  • I found this on planetxbox [planetxbox.com]

    (quote from Bungie's Doug Zartman)

    "Well, you gotta understand that there have been countless rumors of people buying us over theyears - Eidos, GT, Acclaim - and we've developed a policy of not fueling those mills by commenting on the rumors. In general, if you haven't heard something from us, it isn't true."

    (end quote)

    Does that mean anything? well, not really, I guess, but at least it's a semi-official statement. Man, I hope it's not true.

    -------
  • Actually, I've got some pretty good results from scanning myself directly on my scanner.

    For some real fun scanning your face, start with your left cheek on the scanner, and as the scanning head moves, slowly turn your head so that your right cheek is touching the scanner when the scan is complete.

    Creates some... shall we say... interesting results.
  • To really make an efficient use of such techniques in the given situation, you would really be more suited to program the behaviors of such targets, like in simulations used for experimental/business/military applications. Though I am not sure how to say it tactfully in reference to something so tragic as the afformentioned thread. I hope that I haven't offended anyone.
  • My girlfriend and I took pics of ourselves in 'less than full clothing'. Every time one of us trashed the other x number of times, the loser would have to do something for the winner, and I'm not talking about the dishes.
    I've never had so much fun in my life.
  • 230-You are user #999 of 1000 simultaneous users allowed.

  • Re:Oh boy, (Score:3)

    by jbarnett ( 127033 ) on Thursday June 15, 2000 @07:22AM (#999958) Homepage

    Playing with legos. Voliently I might add. You think them leaving those sharp lego in the middle of the floor at night when you are in your bare feet was an accident....

  • I would NOT LOVE a screenshot of myself standing over a lava pit with a rocket launcher. And a G-string.

    However that would be quite funny (IF I actually fit the stereotypical geek profile).

  • Care to put your G-string... err, uhmm.. money where your mouth is?
  • No, 1000 x 10^3 is a thousand thousand, ie a million. A milliard is a thousand million. And a mallard is like a hammer.
  • I thought you brits used the million->milliard->billion system instead of the million->billion->trillion system?
  • D'oh! What I posted was what my maths teacher at school told me. But it turns out he was wrong. According to the OED, billion = million ^ 2, trillion = million ^ 3.

    So there isn't any real advantage to one system over the other - but they are still incompatible once you go above 'million'.

  • The NHS is an excellent system, but it needs cash, badly. I'd gladly pay an extra 10% tax on my grossly inflated earnings, if that was what it took. Sadly, now that the age of conviction politics has given way to soundbite politics, that will never happen.

    Well said. My father was recently diagnosed with prostate cancer, by his NHS doctor (caught early). He was given all the options, and followed the consultant's recommendation to have it completely removed. He was taken into hospital and treated superbly by the best team of doctors in the country for this condition. His hospital stay was short and pleasant (as pleasant as any hospital stay can be) and he is almost fully recovered.

    It's fashionable in the UK to bash the NHS, but it really is excellent in most cases. Yes it has its problems, but I simply cannot imagine the situation if he had to pay for treatment. He could not have afforded it.

    And yeah, I know this is off-topic, but I've wanted to get this off my chest for ages.

  • This is vastly simpler then trying to fit yourself into your buddies' flat bed scanner.

    Another possibility would be to lure your boss into one of these 3-d scanners so that you could take pot shots whenever you wanted.

    Or, even better - add this to the DOOM-sysadmin interface [unm.edu] to add user's faces to the processes that they spawned, and are littering your machine - that way you could get some real personal job satisfaction doing your sysadmin work.

  • The models are supplied in their own custom format. There is software at http://www.vapourtech.com/products/software/avanew /avanew_install.exe
    which will convert these to Half-Life, but not Quake 3. Does anyone know how to convert them to Quake 3? I will pay a visit to the Dome tomorrow if I can get one in Quake 3 format.

    Abashed the Devil stood,
    And felt how awful goodness is

  • ...but I gotta say I kind of liked Tron.

    Actually I didn't feel that bad about Tron, I even put in some references to it into a GPL:ed implementation of ETFTP some time ago. But just like the old Star Trek episodes it's main asset is that it uses old fashioned effects :-)

    Also please note that I didn't say anything about Signal 11, I only mentioned Tron. (FYI I find the flames boring too.) When I saw his post I just thought "Oh not another one raving about Tron": Most of my friends really like the film, and personally I find it mediocre. I put in the "end of line" just to see if anyone would get the reference... the Master Control Program always ended his messages that way :)

    See you at the I/O tower...

  • "Actually, I _do_ live there. And some of the state healthcare systems are _really_ good."

    Please, elaborate on the systems of medical rationing that is practiced in some European countries. For instance, why does the NHS of England have some people waiting up to two years for gall bladder surgery. Or why do some Scandavian countries only allow a few treatments within their guidelines but ignores other, possibly life saving treatments because they are either too expensive or not on the plan?

    "At least, when Europeans do finally get to hospital, then they are there until they're cured or dead, as opposed to when the insurance runs
    out."

    My brother-in-law has a brain tumor. His insurance company will no longer pay for all of his treatment as it is considered terminal. He continues to be treated at MD Anderson, one of the world's finest cancer treatment and research facilities regardless of his ability to pay. I have yet to see any hospital turn away a patient in the US or not do the most they can to save the patient. Your friend was the victim of an illegal practice and my sympathies are with him and his family. My own father died in 1995 because of a "medical oversight". That was not the fault of the government or the insurance company, but that of shortsighted, uncaring doctor. No legislation can demand compassion or a conscience.

    "The NHS is an excellent system, but it needs cash, badly. I'd gladly pay an extra 10% tax on my grossly inflated earnings"

    In my opinion, you pay too much in taxes already, in some European countries as much as 60% of your income *before* paying your own bills - rent, food, utilities, etc. Why not hammer on your elected officials to spend the money more wisely? Or better yet, why not insist they get rid of the overhead (overpaid unions, local restrictions, etc) which lead to money being spent on adminstration and not on patients?
    If the government cannot provide the best possible service than they either need to get out of the business or allow open competition from the private sector. Throwing more money into a losing scheme is a waste and saves no_lives.
  • I used to have a job administrating CA-Unicenter TNG, an "Enterprise Management" suite that is meant to lord over all of your servers, mainframes, network, etc. - everything from job scheduling to desktop software delivery.

    I thought it was really funny to call it the "MCP", but I guess I was the only one. The PHB had no idea what I was talking about. :)

  • Ever played paintball? You're in real life, your shooting your friend, but they're not real bullets. This is at least as real (if not more so) than fragging your friend in Quake.

    In short, I wouldn't worry about it.
  • I think it's stupid to even mention Columbine with a reference to Quake.
    Get real, I've been playing Doom, Quake, Wolfenstein 3D, Warcraft, Starcraft, Blood, Unreal, and many many many others.
    I never had a friggin friend growing up. Those kids were just stupid, whiny, sniveling bastards and the world is just too arrogant to admit that yes, populations do have screwed up individuals. So instead, lets blame video games?
    And maybe if those kids could have skinned their school mates they wouldn't have gone on a murder spree?
    But you do have a good point with the celeb skins,

    nerdfarm.org [nerdfarm.org]

  • TRON is overrated...

    END OF LINE. :-)

  • 2 questions:

    Did anyone find a screenshot of one of these things?

    Secondly, if they scan me and give me the file, who own copyright over my image/avatar?


    Lord Pixel - The cat who walks through walls
  • Dear god I hope this is a joke :(
  • I say Rob, Jeff, and the rest of the guys go get themselves scanned and make their skins publicy accessible. Especially Katz. Heck, you could charge for his skin and people would still get it. (Not that I don't like Katz...) Then anytime someone posts a story you don't like or you just randomly feel like fragging someone, just fire up Q3A, bust out the RL, and go for it!

    "Futuaris nisi irrisus ridebis"

  • My ex-gf is way into UT... I can't say that I really like that game as much as others, but if we ever got back together.
  • > They look like pretty low quality textures to me.

    That's because they are downgraded to Halflife skins (okay, I know squat about games, but that's the official "game avatar" format that you download from the site). The original format (you can view examples on Avatarme.com [avatarme.com]) has a high resolution (although the java demo is *dern* slow).

    Go to "Download Avatar", and then choose the link at the bottom: "view these examples".

    It'd be neat to map these into a vCard type open format, and then display them when you read someone's email.

    --
    Evan

  • Oh boy, I can hear the protests already.

    "Studies show that kids who 'kill their friends' using this technology are highly volitile, and dangerous."

    If a boy were to post a website with photos/models of his friends to 'destroy' in Quake and the school finds out about it, what do you think is going to happen? Bad things my friends, bad things. And we thought the kid being suspended for a critizing web page [slashdot.org] was bad. Or how about the kid punished for his personal web site [slashdot.org].

    Things like this sound cool, look great, and end up hurting people because of ignorant people. Not stupid people, just ignorant to the fact that they think we can't seperate computers and reality. So...what else is new?

  • Re:Oh boy, (Score:3)

    by generic-man ( 33649 ) on Thursday June 15, 2000 @07:27AM (#999988) Homepage Journal
    Here [cnn.com]'s information about the attacks in New York, which happened on Sunday after the Puerto Rican Day parade.

    If you're using Internet Explorer, there's a pretty neat demo at www.avatarme.com [avatarme.com]. You might need a fast PC to take full advantage of it.

  • Photorealistic Skins and Gender (Score:4)

    by Guppy ( 12314 ) on Thursday June 15, 2000 @07:28AM (#999990)
    I think this may have some interesting implications in how photorealistic skins impact gender and gaming. Looking back at an article from last February, Men Playing as Women [slashdot.org], you'll find some really interesting replies in the comments section that apply here as well.

    For instance, a photorealistic skin doesn't guarantee that the person you're playing with actually was the model for that skin, and thus there's no guarantee whether he/she actually is male or female. But players may be more willing to believe in an assumed gender (even if only on a sub-concious level) when it looks like a real-life person.

    For instance, Gender can be used for in-game advantages -- some Males may hesitate to shoot a female, others become more hostile if killed by a female. Females may pretend to be male to avoid being hit on or harassed, and both sexes may pretend to be opposite genders for role-playing or exploration reasons. Take a look at the old article, there are a lot of interesting ideas in it.
  • When I first started lurking on /., I had not used *n?x, and had no idea that "^H" was an ascii representation of the UNIX backspace... But by reading the context of the comments, I understood the meaning right away.

    To not get what was being said, you would have to be 1: Not a geek (not a UNIX geek, anyway), 2: Unable to easilly understand geek humor, and 3: Unwilling to think.

    Geeky shorthand, like using a bang to say "not", adds a lot of color to this site, and I like it.

    Please redirect all future complaints about this stuff to /dev/null.

  • Yea, that's totally different than skinning, because if you are 5 pounds overweight, your avitar will be about 2 pixels wider! Astounding!

    Skins or objects, we are still just talking about replacing the default purdy pictures with a picture of yourself, which is very fun for LAN deathmatches and can make chat rooms a little more spiffy, but is not exactly going to create a mad rush to have ourselves pixelated.

    Why the hell would I want my beer gut to be carefully rendered in 3d anyway? If I was creating a skin of myself for a game, I would probably use photoshop or gimp to slim myself down first.

  • We would use dialups, and modify the base skins in the original quake. Not like using a skin system.
  • We have a similar system at school that we use in a lab, still... You get the idea.

  • Already been done... (Score:4)

    by GoNINzo ( 32266 ) <(GoNINzo) (at) (yahoo.com)> on Thursday June 15, 2000 @08:06AM (#1000014) Journal
    Around 6 months before Q3A came out, I got the unique chance to alpha test Quake 3 Arena in Dallas at id software. I ended up playing with Blue [bluesnews.com] and Redwood [stomped.com], along with Tim Willits and Christian 'Disruptor' Antkow. Oh, and meet most of the rest of the group. And John Cash is the nicest guy in the world!

    Because of the limited number of skins at the time, most of us had the choice of the Tim, Xian, and Sarge skin, because that is about the only skins they had. What was scary is that the Tim skin looked nearly EXACTLY like him. And, in my opinion, was the best player amongst the gathered group. Hence, you learned to run away if you saw Tim running towards you. It was very strange to be running around, and run right into someone you recognize from the real world.

    However, for a team play game that involved pushing a button to get points, we ended up playing almost all the same skins, so the effect was much stranger to see 3 Xian's running around. `8r)

    Anyway, it has been maintained from the begining that id software is able to create photorealistic skins, and that they will provide instruction on how to create your own. There is a PC gamer issue out there discussing that as well.

    --
    Gonzo Granzeau

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Dome Heads! (Score:4)

    by deefer ( 82630 ) on Thursday June 15, 2000 @07:02AM (#1000025) Homepage
    I've been to the Dome.
    This is about the only thing worth going to in the entire place. Only expect to wait for 4 hours to get a go on this - tourists, tourists, tourists, and schoolchildren everywhere.
    I wish they'd used the money instead to create the "Millenium Hospital" or "Millenium Digital Library" instead of this one off pile of shit they wasted our tax money on.
    (Note to US moderators - check the BBC news site for old articles about how most of the UK populace _really_ didn't want this folly.)
    It's cool tech, but wasn't worth the effort.

    Strong data typing is for those with weak minds.

  • Bad Thing (Score:4)

    by Lightwarrior ( 73124 ) on Thursday June 15, 2000 @07:03AM (#1000026) Journal
    does anyone see this as good? it's disturbing enough seeing Fat Bastard with a railgun... do we really want to actually see who we're fragging?

    in all seriousness, is this a good thing? now, instead of just fragging some avatar of your buddy, you're fragging a look-alike. does this disturb anyone else but me? as for fragging the Gallaghers, wouldn't they have to get scanned in?

    better realism in skins are a good thing - i just don't think they should be going this direction. i'd much rather see a photo-realistic skin of, say, Jar-Jar (frag away!) than one of my buddies down the hall.

    -lw

  • Oh, what I'd give.....
  • yeah but when he had a railgun in his hands and someone asked him what it was he would reply "i dont know"....heheheh
  • OK, we need the paranoid point of view, so here it is. I have been saying for a few years that we aren't far off in computing ability to make the Running Man scenerio a real possibility. While it might be really neat to have yourself scanned so that you can plug it into a game, you need to ask yourself who might have access to your scan besides you? I would imagine that the scanning process is hi res enough so that someone with enough computing power could insert you into security camera footage and make it look real. So much for an alibi. I imagine that the Spooks are drooling over this and are trying to figure out how to incorporate high speed scans into something like airport metal detectors. Before you discount me as a paranoid anti-government freak, ask yourself if the capabilities are real.

  • the dome was a few days from bankruptcy (Score:3)

    by divec ( 48748 ) on Thursday June 15, 2000 @08:41AM (#1000046) Homepage
    it generates a lot of money from tourists

    According to the BBC today [bbc.co.uk], the dome was a few days away from bankruptcy when it last got some money from the National Lottery, so it ain't making money for itself.


    I also doubt it's pulling tourists in from abroad very much, by itself - who'd travel to the UK just to see the dome? This applies too to far-flung parts of Britain - apparently only 800 people from Scotland visited the dome in one month. It might be attracting Londoners, but they'd probably spend their money elsewhere if they didn't visit the dome. From an economic point of view, the dome is a flop.


    Of course, as you say, there's more to it than just economics, and there may be other things about the dome which are good. Personally I think they shouldn't have put it in London - London already has thousands of landmarks and adding just one more won't make much difference. It'd've been much more spectacular in Birmingham, Manchester, Leeds, Cardiff, Newcastle or Glasgow (though the last two are probably less good because they're not very central in the UK).
  • From the AvatarMe FAQ [avatarme.com]:

    Who owns my Avatar? AvatarMe Ltd owns the copyright to all avatars made in the AvatarBooth. On downloading your Avatar, AvatarMe Ltd gives you permission to use it.

    This seems pretty slimey to me. They say they won't sell your avatar without permission, but then, why do they need to claim ownership of it? Highly suspicious.

    There were screenshots at the first URL listed, but that server seems to have died. I managed to look at one before it went. I wasn't all that impressed.

    If a tree falls in the forest, and kills a mime, does anyone care?

  • IMHO, somebody should actually mod this joker way up for being both funny and insightful.

    In one paragraph of "Beavis and Butthead" -esque sarcasm, he neatly expressed exactly how much impact this "technology" will really have on the world.

  • I need help... (Score:4)

    by tringstad ( 168599 ) on Thursday June 15, 2000 @08:42AM (#1000049)
    ...convincing my boss to take a trip to the Millenium Dome.

    Why the hell would I want to get myself scanned? I never see my self when I'm playing, but if I could make everyone else look like my boss, I can garauntee an increase in my Frag Count.

    -Tommy

  • Re:I did it! (Score:3)

    by Pike ( 52876 ) on Thursday June 15, 2000 @08:43AM (#1000050) Journal
    You better shut up and get back to work before your user finds out :-)
  • This is vastly simpler than trying to fit yourself into your buddies' flat bed scanner

    We just need scaling down a bit. See here [cat-scan.com].

  • Staggering Potential (Score:3)

    by Dungeon Dweller ( 134014 ) on Thursday June 15, 2000 @07:05AM (#1000055)
    "No kidding, now you can have your face and body realistically mapped into your favourite game - the potential is staggering..."

    Yeah... Yeah! Uh, YEAH! You could uhh... Stick your face into a video game... or... a chat program... or even... a chat program... oh wait, I said that. Wait, hasn't that all been done before, so, what we're really talking about is matching yourself up with Quake's relatively limited palette, which was designed to not hog the resources of older systems, yet still look nice and menacing... Yeah, ok, so, it's pretty basic stuff... Yeah, oh well.

    (P.S. You are allowed to laugh, no, I'm not cracking on the article or the tech, it's just... Well, yeah, maybe a little.)
  • Twisted as it may be, this does pose a good point-- if you can use a photo to do this, then you can skin anyone into your games. Maybe the colombine kids would've targeted more specific real people if they'd been practicing with them as virtual targets. On another hand, will Cindy Crawford try to stop people from skinning her likeness into Panty Raider? Will Heston want his face skinned behind the gun of some new games as a promotional thing? Will the guy who incessantly bombards us with "Whassssuup!" sue to keep his face off of the targets?

  • great... (Score:4)

    by matticus ( 93537 ) on Thursday June 15, 2000 @07:08AM (#1000057) Homepage
    now there will be a whole bunch of photo-realistic skinny white males with large glasses and names like DrPOisOnSkULL and dEATHwarrant on my local quake server...
  • They look like pretty low quality textures to me. Do games players eventually adapt and evolve some kind of upconverting filters in their eyes so that this stuff looks photoreal to them - like the way people at SGI used to be able to filter out the dithering in their old machines and the way Sony people filter out anti-aliasing on their game machines.
    --

  • Re:Oh boy, (Score:3)

    by heliocentric ( 74613 ) on Thursday June 15, 2000 @07:09AM (#1000059) Homepage Journal
    I've heard the claims that kids shoot people after playing these video games... but where are the kids who should be creating giant walls after playing tetris??

  • Flatbed scanners (Score:4)

    by Tet ( 2721 ) <`ku.oc.enydartsa' `ta' `todhsals'> on Thursday June 15, 2000 @07:09AM (#1000060) Homepage Journal
    This is vastly simpler then trying to fit yourself into your buddies' flat bed scanner.

    Actually, I've got some pretty good results from scanning myself directly on my scanner. Face only, of course, but surprisingly good, nonetheless. All this talk of photorealistic skins reminds me of a former job where we used to play doom at lunchtime. We scanned a picture of one guy's baby in, and used that in place of the flaming skulls. He could never quite bring himself to blow his baby away with a shotgun, which gave the rest of us an advantage in multiplayer games with monsters...

  • My friends put me into the original Quake. One day I got onto the server to play and I was killing myself all over the place!
  • Can somebody realise this isn't just skinning!

    This takes a 3D image of your body, i.e., not a bitmap of what you are wearing, but the shape of your body. Hence the beergut in the pictures. You can then automatically convert them into Quake objects - real 3D objects with your clothes and images all over them.

    So it isn't just your images plastered over a standard Quake 3D model, it is your images plastered over a 3D representation of your own body. Even if you could be bothered to create your own 3D model, this is a lot quicker, and probably a lot more accurate.

    And I would like to see who I am shooting actually - this would make the game much more interesting. Somebody get Jon Katz into the Avatar...

  • I think something like the avitars from the chat room conference in the early chapters of Gibson's "Idoru" is more likely.

    One girl went with a "slightly enhanced" version of herself, while a k3wl d00d she was talking to used a floating "wizzard of oz" style Death Head, complete with a text slogan meant to show how 1337 she was (but was lost in the translation).

    Where both authors go wrong (IMHO) is when they assume that this stuff will be a big deal, and costly to come by. Later in the book, that same girl has to obtain some virtual formal wear for another meeting, and IIRC she could barely afford it.

    What Gibson and Stephenson seem to miss is that we are already expressing emotions and editing our "presentation" for our avitars, even in text environments like MUD's. Avitar clothes and facial expressions will continue to evolve along with the rest of the technology, and on-line chat users will continue to take them for granted.

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