Holographic memories : how the future will remember the past
Remember the scene in Minority Report where Tom Cruise is visualizing memories from his family? First, the holographic recording of his son running, then his wife, appearing majestically in the room, in full scale in front of him.
Yep, that’s the one
The scene is effective and beautiful, as you can feel the nostalgia. As with an incredible number of other technologies used in the film, it was also prescient in imagining what would happen next. The 3D depiction of the hero’s wife looks really similar to what would be possible to render with today’s technology. We’re pretty sure about that because we did it, and you can download today the first beta of Mimesys here.
An example of Mimesys memory (1 kinect V2)
Bringing depth to memories
Mimesys software uses depthcams to capture the image and the depth from reality, and reconstruct a 3D model in real-time. This makes a lot of difference when the model is seen in a VR or AR headset : when facing a human recorded in 3D, you will recover a lot of the social cues that rule social interactions.
Mimesys mesh, as seen in Unity
It made me realize that a few things control this feeling of being in front of a person : the depth cues are indeed very important to have the impression to be in the same place. The second most important thing is probably movement. As many people have noted with the Toybox demo, having just a head and hands can be sometimes enough to convey the impression of being with someone if their movement is consistent with reality. What Mimesys captures show is that movement is crucial, and even if the quality is far from perfect (but constantly improving!), the conservation of movement makes human beings feel like human beings, in a much more convincing way than the most expensive rigged videogame character for instance.