NaturalMotion goes real-time
I'm excited to see that UK motion synthesis provider NaturalMotion is finally moving their technology into the real-time arena, which I believe is what they always intended to provide.
CEO Torsten Reil did his Master's thesis on this stuff at the University of Sussex's COGS department (now Informatics) nigh-on ten years ago, and I was keeping an eye on his work in Oxford when I took the same course there a couple of years later. It always seemed a great pity that their first product was an offline tool for synthesising canned animations, when the whole point of motion synthesis is that you don't need to be limited to canned animations! :) Thankfully, the 360 and PS3's brute strength makes real-time synthesis a distinct possibility at last.
I wonder what Ken Perlin will make of Euphoria? His work uses hand-crafted stochastic models driven by authorial goals for an 'illusion of life', whereas Torsten's work uses models inspired by evolutionary robotics and related biological research on the dynamical systems which underlie 'real life' motion.