Motion capture users dispel the myths - profile of several motion capture firms

Post, July, 2002 by Christine Bunish

Marketed to animation content creators and developers, TalkBack is a non-realtime analysis SDK for adding automated facial animation, including lipsyncing and speech gestures to characters. It can analyze audio files based on prerecorded files, the human voice or the output of a text-to-speech engine.

DAG has employed TalkBack on its "The Head" and "William Shakespeare" characters.

TalkBack is not used on the company's famous "Ananova," the world's first virtual newscaster, who is driven by text instead of by an audio source. The Head, an outspoken character who ranted and raved on his own UK TV show before DAG used TalkBack, has since used TalkBack for appearances in PowerPoint presentations and a big-screen projection at a launch party for DAG's new studio.

DAG also tapped TalkBack for the virtual William Shakespeare who performed stand-up comedy routines linking programs in a Sunday-night comedy block for BBC Prime, a digital channel seen across Europe and the Middle East.

The time savings DAG animators achieve with TalkBack played a key role in the Shakespeare project. "The BBC might have to order animation weeks in advance," McCulloch notes. "But they were able to script something the morning of the broadcast, record the voiceover, ISDN it to us and we'd sent the finished broadcast animation back to them a couple of hours later. That meant scripts could be completely topical and respond to any changes in program scheduling."

McCulloch says DAG is also pleased with the way TalkBack has been designed from a programmer's point of view. "Integrating their technology with ours is very straightforward," he reports.