Hi Everyone, I’m collecting information about the state of the art in 2-D and 3-D avatars.  We know about Sitepal/Oddcast and several other vendors, but I’m curious if anyone has experience with different technologies we may not know about. 

Does anyone have experience with the latest avatar technology, that you can hook up to a chatbot, on a web browser and/or mobile device?  What is your experience?  Can you recommend any good solutions?

> http://www.meta-guide.com/home/about/best-of-the-best-videos/best-virtual-mannequin-videos

Richard, I just updated my “Best Virtual Mannequin Videos” page (above) especially for you!  At least one of these companies claims to already have voice interactive virtual mannequins available.  There are two other variations on the rear projection theme.  Researchers are using rear projection talking heads.  And, big time stage productions are using a variation for life size “holographic” 3D projections.

Richard Wallace - Oct 8, 2013:

Hi Everyone, I’m collecting information about the state of the art in 2-D and 3-D avatars.  We know about Sitepal/Oddcast and several other vendors, but I’m curious if anyone has experience with different technologies we may not know about. 

Does anyone have experience with the latest avatar technology, that you can hook up to a chatbot, on a web browser and/or mobile device?  What is your experience?  Can you recommend any good solutions?

Yes, I enjoy 3D avatar technology very much, so I look forward to this discussion.  I think Rollo Carpenter and I, may have something in common.  As far as I can tell, we both may have had our talking 3D animated avatars aired on TV, broadcast internationally.  Personally, I would express a good opinion of Sitepal/Oddcast, if that is on topic for discussion here.

Marcus Endicott - Oct 8, 2013:

> http://www.meta-guide.com/home/about/best-of-the-best-videos/best-virtual-mannequin-videos

Richard, I just updated my “Best Virtual Mannequin Videos” page (above) especially for you!  At least one of these companies claims to already have voice interactive virtual mannequins available.  There are two other variations on the rear projection theme.  Researchers are using rear projection talking heads.  And, big time stage productions are using a variation for life size “holographic” 3D projections.

Thank you Marcus! I look forward to checking out all the latest 3D avatar developments on meta-guide!

CrazyTalk avatars are becoming more and more versatile but I cannot really comment as I haven’t had a play with them yet, just seen a few videos.  They used to have a web component but I am not sure if that has been developed further - it used to only work with IE, clearly not practical these days…

http://www.reallusion.com/crazytalk/crazytalk.aspx

There’s a video there you can watch too.  Hope this helps a little.

There are some FREE open source resources for 3D avatars in Blender 2.68 running on Linux. Marcus inspired me by what he did on meta-guide.  So, I put some of my initial research, into open source 3D avatars, on display at: http://www.elizabot.com/blender

http://www.gamerthom.com/p10/@charctercreationsanddesignworks.us/CharacterHeads.html

I don’t know what state the downloading process is in, the owner passed away some time ago, but I recall people using them and asking questions at the AI Nexus Forum.

http://www.gamerthom.com/Archive/sitedirectory.html

Also:

http://aidreams.co.uk/forum/index.php?board=48.0

Those Haptek heads used to be great but there doesn’t seem to be any support any more since Windows XP.