Zabaware, the developer of Ultra Hal (http://www.zabaware.com), has been working on a new 3D character animation engine for the past few years to eventually replace the current proprietary Haptek engine we currently use. The benefits of the new engine include:
[ul][li]More modern system that can take advantage of current generation graphics cards for improved quality[/li][li]Cross platform support. We are focusing on Windows, IOS, and Android now but will expand to include Mac OS X and Linux support.[/li][li]Easy and encouraged user customizability of characters. Full body characters will be supported as well as full 3d environment rendering.[/li][li]Potential to be a common graphics platform for chatbot developers due to its open source nature.[/li][/ul]

The Zabaware character engine is being built using the open source OGRE3D (http://www.ogre3d.org) graphics libraries. The engine itself will be released under the open source GPL 3 license. This means the engine has the potential to impact more than just Zabaware. Any chatbot developer or company outside of Zabaware will be able to utilize, build-on, and improve the Zabaware character engine in their own projects. Currently the chatbot industry uses many different proprietary solutions for character animation. I believe that with one open common system we can improve the quality of all bots and have ease at targeting multiple computing platforms all at once. The current source code is available at http://charengine.sourceforge.net

Zabaware has spent over $45,000 in developing the engine so far but has run out of funding to finish the job. We are now reaching out to the greater chatbot community (including chat bot enthusiasts and other chatbot developers) to try to raise $20,000 to finish the job. This will pay for an experienced OGRE3D developer and graphics artists to finish the job already started.

If you are interested in donating to support this project please visit Zabaware’s Peerbackers page at http://peerbackers.com/projects/3d-character-animation-engine-for-chatbots for detailed information and to donate to the project. Various rewards for donating are available.

Best of luck Robert, I hope you are able to raise the funds.

Some years ago I gave my contribution to Hal, by developing a few plugins. Now it’s unfortunately getting more and more difficult for me to spend enough time on this great product.

So, after reading this post by Robert, I have immediatley decided to give my little help in funding this 3D Character Animation Engine for Chatbots.

I’ve always considered the graphical characters as the weakest aspect of Hal. Haptek was a promising technology, but it’s not been enhanced and supported during the last decade.

That’s why I believe that Zabaware should be helped by all the people who are interested in the development of smart chatbots with a realistic graphical interface.

Robert, I’m sure you have all the skills to complete this project and to bring Hal at this higher level of usability. Let me know if I can help in some other way.

Hi, Robert, and welcome to chatbots.org!

As a moderator here, it’s my “job” to monitor the forums and determine whether posts like yours are considered to be “spam”. I’ve decided that, while your post is intended to “sell” something (or, at least, ask for money in the form of funding for your project), it fails to fall into the category of “spam” because the “product” you’re offering is of value to a significant portion of the AI community at large. But as I mentioned over at AI Dreams, the term “crowdfunded” isn’t something that goes over well, because nearly every product or service that’s commercially offered can be construed as “crowd-funded”.

Ok now, that being said, I’ll have a look at the project, and if I can assist in any way, I’ll pitch in.

If I might make a suggestion, though, it may not be a bad idea to let the community here know about your involvement in the field of AI, and avatar representation over the past years, so that we all can get a feel for your interests in this area. Just a thought.

Thank you, Vittorio, for your generous contribution to this project and for all your work on plug in development for Ultra Hal in the past.

Dave Morton - Jun 30, 2011:

Hi, Robert, and welcome to chatbots.org!

As a moderator here, it’s my “job” to monitor the forums and determine whether posts like yours are considered to be “spam”. I’ve decided that, while your post is intended to “sell” something (or, at least, ask for money in the form of funding for your project), it fails to fall into the category of “spam” because the “product” you’re offering is of value to a significant portion of the AI community at large. But as I mentioned over at AI Dreams, the term “crowdfunded” isn’t something that goes over well, because nearly every product or service that’s commercially offered can be construed as “crowd-funded”.

Ok now, that being said, I’ll have a look at the project, and if I can assist in any way, I’ll pitch in.

If I might make a suggestion, though, it may not be a bad idea to let the community here know about your involvement in the field of AI, and avatar representation over the past years, so that we all can get a feel for your interests in this area. Just a thought.

Thanks for your feedback and for not marking this post as spam. Crowdfunded is a term used by sites like kickstarter.com and peerbackers.com that help projects get off the ground by seeking many small donations from the public as opposed to investor-funded or taking out a loan.

I have been working on chatbots since 1995 and founded my small chatbot company called Zabaware back in 1997. Ultra Hal is the name of our main product. Ultra Hal is a “learning” bot that tries to base its responses on past conversations based on statistical analysis it does on a huge database of past conversations. It’s a past Loebner winner having won most human computer in 2007 and placed 2nd in 2006.

Ultra Hal has been a multimedia-heavy bot since the beginning too. It supports speech synthesis, speech recognition, and currently uses the Haptek character engine for character animation. You can see a promo video of Ultra Hal in action at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lcFiL9Lcy_8 or check out the bot at http://www.zabaware.com

I have a bit of a question about the project (I also asked about it over on AI dreams). It’s about the licensing, which confuses me. As I understand it, the character engine will be based on Ogre and will be licensed under the GPL3 license. But as fas as I understand this license, it doesn’t allow any commercial products to use a GPL’d library. How does this work in combination with Ultra-hal? can it even use this character engine without going open source itself?

@Robert: Great to hear you’ve been progressing to so far, and sorry to hear you seem to be stuck temporary through funding.

We’re in the process on raising funds ourselves. We’ve working with professionals, vendors working for major corporations with large call centers. Although it’s progressing step by step, it’s harder than I anticipated, I’m convinced that the industry will take off in the coming years. That’s all happening right now!

So hang in there! (learned this phrase last week, hopefully it’s appropriate here:-s). It will all be fine!

Jan Bogaerts - Jul 1, 2011:

I have a bit of a question about the project (I also asked about it over on AI dreams). It’s about the licensing, which confuses me. As I understand it, the character engine will be based on Ogre and will be licensed under the GPL3 license. But as fas as I understand this license, it doesn’t allow any commercial products to use a GPL’d library. How does this work in combination with Ultra-hal? can it even use this character engine without going open source itself?

Ogre is licensed under the MIT license which is a permissive license that allows you to link to pretty much any other license. The character engine does not modify the Ogre code, we link to it and build off of it, so the character engine is GPL 3. We own the character engine code so we are free to release it under other licenses as well so we can release it with a proprietary product without being forced to make the proprietary product open source as well. If you are interested in using the character engine in a proprietary product I’m open to providing a proprietary license to do so, in fact on the peerbackers page I listed a “reward” option that if you donate $4000 to the project I’ll give you a proprietary license. Otherwise it is freely available as GPL 3.

Erwin Van Lun - Jul 1, 2011:

@Robert: Great to hear you’ve been progressing to so far, and sorry to hear you seem to be stuck temporary through funding.

We’re in the process on raising funds ourselves. We’ve working with professionals, vendors working for major corporations with large call centers. Although it’s progressing step by step, it’s harder than I anticipated, I’m convinced that the industry will take off in the coming years. That’s all happening right now!

So hang in there! (learned this phrase last week, hopefully it’s appropriate here:-s). It will all be fine!

Thanks for the encouragement and good luck on your endeavors too!
Thanks for the encouragement and good luck on your endeavors too!

just received some great news, to be disclosed probably on Monday!

In speech animation, morph targets display lip postures.
May I ask, where this OGRE3D project is in relation to morph targets?

__________________________________________________________
If there are any confidentiality issues, please feel free to ignore this question.

8PLA • NET - Jul 1, 2011:

In speech animation, morph targets display lip postures.
May I ask, where this OGRE3D project is in relation to morph targets?

Glad you asked. I’ll try to fill in some more technical details on the capabilities of the engine. The engine is about 90% complete for working with Windows and we have a working prototype. This is actually a description of what the engine already does in its current state:

Our system uses morph targets, and one of the things that makes it so special is that we give a great deal of control about how the face moves between those targets.  This allows us to tune specifically for an inhuman character like an Orc, or a regular human, or even something like Terrance and Philip from South Park (quick, virtually non animated transitions).

Another thing about our system is that we also mix in emotions as morph targets, so the character can display complex combinations of emotional states in mixes, all while talking.  We also have a special kind of “morph animation sequence”, which allows an artist to include subtle additional layers of animation.  For example, picture a woman speaking, then a woman singing the same words she just spoke.  We can make that difference by applying one of our special animation types.

In addition to that, we also have skeletal animation support, meaning that our characters would fit right in to a game like Fallout… they can walk, run, shoot guns, etc. all while making full use of our system.  Again as an example, a soldier might have certain levels of fear, courage, rage, doubt (whatever) and we can apply them to his face, meaning whatever he says will come out of a face that accurately represents his state of mind, instead of the cardboard cutouts we see in games today.

So in a simpler way:

* Yes, we use morph targets as one of the fundamental elements of our system
* Among our best features is the way we blend between those morph targets, and layer them, and how much control we give the programmer over blending - it took a lot of work to build what we have, so people shouldn’t get the idea that if they can set a morph target, they can just emulate what we have
* We also have our own special type of morph animation technique which allows us to create very expressive characters, and it’s not hard for people to use
* We also support skeletal animation for characters (though that’s more for bodies)
* We also support morph animation (which is something we’ve never needed to use use and probably never will)

The engine code is very modular and even though we utilize Ogre3D it is not married to Ogre. It can be set up so that other game/graphics engines can use it as well.  To put it another way, if you’d rather use Unity instead of Ogre3D for the backend, that is possible if you want to put in the work to make a Unity plugin.

I wish I could post an executable demo showing the current state of the engine but one of the main problems we have is that the characters we have created are owned by Ford Motor Company. This engine was originally created while Zabaware was working on a contract for Ford. Part of the $20,000 we are requesting is for an artist to create new characters under an open license.

But if anyone wants to see our engine running the Ford characters and see the level of control given to the programmer I’d be happy to send you an executable if you want to sign a non disclosure agreement. I just want to prevent the characters from being publicly released.

Thanks for the support of everyone who contributed so far. If we manage to raise the $2500 ($1305 to go as of this message) for this project I will use it to purchase the Amy character from turbo squid http://www.turbosquid.com/FullPreview/Index.cfm/ID/448779 , pay an artist to configure the model for use with our engine and make a really simple outdoor environment for her. The money will also go to pay my 3d engine developer to get an interactive demo of the engine up and running (independent of Ultra Hal) and as a plug-in for Ultra Hal. We should be able to get this done in about a month or so and I hope getting a demo out will help build some more interest in this project.

I should be able to finance the remaining cost ($17,500) of the original project through several loan sources that have recently been made available to me. This will go mostly to creating the mobile versions of the engine, an open source character, and tutorial for character creation. But I want to get a public demo out of this engine out as soon as possible and this Amy character from turbosquid should be fairly easy to get to work with the engine code we already have.

The peerbackers crowdfunding drive has about 10 days left and $1305 to go. I’d appreciate any contribution, no matter how small. I believe this project can be a great open source alternative for character animation for all the chatbot authors out there.

Robert Medeksza - Aug 4, 2011:

I will use it to purchase the Amy character from turbo squid http://www.turbosquid.com/FullPreview/Index.cfm/ID/448779 , pay an artist to configure the model for use with our engine and make a really simple outdoor environment for her.

Friendly suggestion:
Worry less about the outdoor scene, and more about Lip Sync. 
Is there a sample video of that model speaking?

If yes, does it look something like this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=70AqQ9XYpZc

That was meant as humor. No offense intended to that blender artist.
There seems to have been some open source challenges with lip sync.
So focusing on that early on may be helpful. 

Out of curiosity, and definitely not to suggest you shouldn’t use the excellent company you mentioned, but for the sake of members who may be on a lower budget… Have you found any other less expensive, lower quality, but still good enough, 3D models for sale, or for free from other companies?  The MakeHuman 3D model is open source, and “she” looks pretty awesome!

Congratulations on the success you have had so far!  That’s good news.