simulation – Artificial Intelligence

Synthesizing Obama: Learning Lip Sync from Audio

Gregor Tatschl — Tue, 08 Aug 2017 21:25:46 +0000

Supasorn Suwajanakorn (TH), Steven Seitz (US), Ira Kemelmacher-Shlizerman (IL)

Given audio of President Barack Obama, the scientists synthesize a high-quality video of him speaking with accurate lip sync, composited into a target video clip.

Trained on many hours of his weekly address footage, a recurrent neural network learns the mapping from raw audio features to mouth shapes. Given the mouth shape at each time instant, the artists synthesize high-quality mouth texture, and composite it with proper 3D pose matching to change what he appears to be saying in a target video to match the input audio track. This approach produces impressive photorealistic results.

Credits

GRAIL Lab @ University of Washington

You are President

Gregor Tatschl — Tue, 08 Aug 2017 09:28:10 +0000

Manuel Achhorner (AT), Josef Adelsberger (AT)

You are President is a game in which the player is the head of government of a fictitious country. His decisions have an impact on six factors: diplomacy, the economy, the budget, popularity among the citizenry, the environment, and the armed forces. The object of the game is to successfully take actions to effectively manage the affairs of state. All of these factors are reflected by scores, which the player’s various decisions can influence either positively or negatively.

On the whole, the player has to display strategic thinking and foresight so that he can lead his country into a bright future. In case one of the scores drops to 0, the head of government is removed from office—either constitutionally or violently. Whoever survives his term in office goes off into a peaceful retirement.

Austronomy

Gregor Tatschl — Sun, 06 Aug 2017 11:00:47 +0000

Florian Voggeneder (AT)

Austrian astronaut Franz Viehböck’s lift-off to the MIR space station on October 1st, 1991, was accompanied by a euphoric celebration of this country’s giant leap into the cosmos. 25 years later, Florian Voggeneder boldly goes on a photographic mission to document the implications of this miniature Space Age.

Obscure artifacts and unworldly landscapes, space enthusiasts and research facilities converge in a narrative at the cusp of fiction and folklore that explores the possibility of an Alpine space program. In Deep Space 8K, the artist elaborates on his project’s progress to date and participation in scientific space simulations.