The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast Avatar SDK & itSeez3D CEO Victor Erukhimov at AWE Show 2019

Episode Date: June 2, 2019

Avatar SDK & itSeez3D CEO Victor Erukhimov at AWE Show 2019

Hi folks, Chris Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com, coming here with another podcast episode. Today you're going to see us at AWE show in Santa Clara, San Francisco. We're here checking out all the VR and AR conference. And I'm here with a really cool company, and they have some products that are just going to blow your freaking mind. And I'm here with Victor Erekimov, the CEO of itsy 3d and avatar sdk how you doing victor i'm doing really really great it's great crowd here awesome sauce and you guys are uh here in the pavilion uh you're right under the tools and uh interaction sign so uh those of you who are

looking for what booth number should we be looking for you guys here at the show? Yeah, we're here at booth number 935. 935. And of course, you can see it, they got a big giant blue thing here with a big lady's face on a few things. So what give us the website. So we're gonna look this up on the web and tell us what it is you guys are doing here. So we're doing the product name Avatar SDK, and you can go to the website avatarsdk.com to check it out. It's a system that allows you to create a 3D model of a person from a single selfie. So you can send us an image, and we'll automatically create you a 3D model of a human sketch that is absolutely

recognizable. It's gonna be mesh, texture and a set of blend shapes that you can animate this. Our system is used by games to immerse a player in a game. It's been used by AR and VR both for communication like social apps and for creating avatars for all kinds of use cases like medical and training we are used by social mobile apps it's it's very easy to start using us. We have engines for Unity and Unreal. We also have SDKs for iOS, Android, Windows, and Mac. And we have a cloud service. Awesome, Sauce.

So this is pretty cool. We're going to show a demo of this here in the split of this video. And what you guys have is you guys can literally just with the phone app, take my picture just from the front and it builds a 3D model avatar of me. Yes, basically we're going to take just a single flat image of you and it's going to create a 3D model

that is as recognizable as your photo and you can render it in 3D, you can put it in a game, you can put it in a VR experience. And it's pretty darn amazing. You just took a picture of me, and it created like a full upper torso of me. Yeah, the way it works is we have a large collection of 3D models of people, and we render the frontal images,

and then we're using deep learning to train the relationship between 3D model, mesh and texture, and a 2D image. And then we use this deep learning model to solve an inverse problem. Given an image, what's the 3D model of a person? So we can guess how you look from behind we can animate your face so that you get your own set of emotions we can do all kinds of things from just one image and that was what was crazy like i was blinking and it was you know the camera from the phone was seeing me blink this it was seeing my head turn left and right. It's pretty freaky.

I mean, it's kind of creepy, really. Yeah, and you can actually, we can make you talk. We can make you say things, you know. And we can do this in real time from just a phone. And, you know, what's interesting about this technology is it's probably really cool for VR, right? So if I'm in a space of VR with a St. Oculus headset and I want to take and be in the environment, this is the way to do it? Yes, absolutely. You just need a photo and then you can get an FBX file from us and then

you can put it in your VR experience. Our customers take our head models and they attach it to full-body models so that you can not just have an upper-body avatar, you can have a full-body avatar. And you can put it in VR experience. You can animate it using lip-sync technologies. We give you a set of blend shapes that are compatible to all kinds of third-party engines used for animating faces. Oh, wow. So what are some of the use cases for this, aside from VR and stuff like that?

Well, as I said, we're used for gaming. When a player takes a photo of himself and gets himself in a game, and then you can generate a very nice video of him doing some sports game or something else. So basically, I can really personalize my game. So if I'm playing a favorite game from a favorite maker... Yeah, if you like boxing, for example you you can get your own avatar and then you can shoot a video of yourself boxing with somebody else on a ring and and then you can you can also like vr applications and they are applications where you can talk to other people, you know, and when you put a virtual

headset on and you see yourself and your colleague there, it feels like you're there, you know. It's a great tool for, like, just to raising the distance between you. You can be on a different continent, but in VR you're going to be in the same room. And because we create avatars that are so recognizable, it creates this emotional connection with this avatar. So you feel like you are there, and you feel like you are talking to that person. It's so much better than just a video conferencing solution.

And I know a lot of times when I'm playing I'm playing video games I'm a big video game and we have a big audience than that you when you create a video game avatar or person in your game they try and make it so you can personalize this but Jesus you could personalize this so that it really looks like I'm the one playing the game. Yeah, exactly. It's pretty hard to get a likeness of you just by collecting your avatar from different pieces. What we are doing is much better. You just take an image, so you don't need to care about all these customizations.

It's just there. But then, on top of that, we also can provide you customizations. You can change your hairstyle. You can apply a cartoonish stylization for you. Later on, we're going to do different skin color, lip color, eyelashes, and so on. So you will be able to do all kinds of cool things with your avatar. But still, right now, you can get just from a single selfie, you get a likeness of yourself that's as recognizable as a photo.

Wow. That's going to be freaking amazing, man. And so, basically, I can download the app, and I can make a personal photo. It'll mirror my stuff. And you guys are doing a lot of business-to-business working with companies. Yeah, mostly we are a business-to-business company. We have a cloud API where you send us an image, you get back an FBX file or an OBJ with a set of blend shapes

in binary format. And we also have iOS and Android SDKs that you can use to generate avatars locally on a phone. And that you can use to generate avatars locally on a phone. Uh-huh. And there's also Windows and Mac SDKs. Wow. We also can provide you a standalone server, which is an executable file that allows you to build your own cloud solution with avatars.

Wow. It serves a range of solutions, including plug-ins for Unity and Unreal that can help you if you're using these engines. That's pretty darn amazing what you guys have going on. So you guys are here at AWE 2019. You guys got a great booth set up.

People can find it. Anything more we need to know about what you guys are and what you guys do? Yeah, it's AWE 2019. It's booth number 935. 935 booth. You can find them right under the tools and interaction thing, and they've got a big blue booth, so you can't miss it, especially when you look for the young lady on the thing.

But this is pretty cool. This is pretty mind-blowing. So we're going to see kind of an example of how this works here in a second. So let's get into that. Yeah, check out avatarSDK.com, download our iOS app, Face Hero, and visit our booth to have a chat about how you can use avatars in your own application. All right, thank you very much, Victor. Thank you very much.

All right, bye-bye.