Continued from Sony Venture Animates Human Face in Picture [Part 1]
Sasaki and his colleagues started to develop the basic technology of the MotionPortrait in about 2004 with Osamu Watanabe, who then was developing image processing technologies for business use at the Sony Kihara Laboratory and is the current CTO of MotionPortrait Inc.
Sasaki, at that time, just returned to Japan from the University of Washington, which is famous for animation technologies and to which he was dispatched from Sony as a researcher. He was taxing his brain, trying to develop a technology that can amuse users of camera-equipped mobile phones, which were becoming prevalent in Japan.
"What should I use to surprise people?" he thought. "It would be surprising if a face in a still image suddenly starts moving." After going over various ideas, he concluded that human faces are promising subjects.
After deciding the subject and goal, Sasaki developed a prototype of the CG technology in about half a year. The expertise accumulated in the Kihara Laboratory, which was established in 1988, contributed to the rapid development of the technology.
In the first demonstration, facial characteristics were extracted manually, not automatically. Still, it made enough impact on the audience. Some researches who watched the demonstration said, "It's interesting. But what is it used for?"
The first idea that researchers at the Kihara Laboratory came up with was to apply the technology to game software. With the aim of establishing a licensing business, they continued to make efforts to develop a technology to automatically identify facial characteristics and a development tool. However, one day, they were ordered to close the laboratory.
At a large company like Sony, it is not easy to use a newly-developed technology to launch a business in a short period of time. But, considering that it is too regrettable to keep the technology unused, Jyunichi Fujita, then president of the Kihara Laboratory and the current president of MotionPortrait Inc, and his colleagues asked So-net Entertainment Corp, one of Sony's group companies, to invest in their business.
An executive officer of So-net Entertainment said, "It might succeed as a business," and decided to launch a new business with seven researchers.
"Our clients are surprised by demonstrations that use their own faces and go back to their companies with smiles on their faces, " said Masaharu Yoshimori, a board member and the chief planning officer of MotionPortrait Inc. "It really makes people happy."
The company sometimes receives feedbacks from clients. In fact, the technology to replace a face in a movie with a face in a picture was derived from one of those feedbacks.
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