Stardust from PostPanic on Vimeo.

A Japanese pop band, AKB48, has shown how one of their band members is a digital FX amalgamation of the other band members. I am awestruck at the level of realism they’ve achieved. That millions of fans had no idea that Eguchi Aimi was a virtual pop star until the secret was out is further testament to what digital artistry and raw computing power can do to shape culture.

I can’t help but have a huge urge to re-read Idoru by William Gibson.

via Gizmodo.

Very fun branded content from Intel to build buzz around their i5 CPU

In honor of our company outing to see the latest Tron film, Tron: Legacy, here’s some great Fandago coverage of the film. Great insight into all the work that goes into the acting and production value that goes a film this mind-blowing, including some cool insights into the technology used around 2:00.

Hand-tweened facial mapping and 3D animation has always been one of the hardest things to make convincing. There’s just something… human… that can’t be easily recreated in a virtual character. Especially not in the lower-polygon meshes used by 3D gaming.

However, thanks to some of the latest facial actor capture technology in play at Rockstar Games, all of that is changing like never before as seen here in the upcoming L.A. Noire game.

via Devour

This video demonstrates some crazy new software, “MovieReshape”, which uses a combination of motion tracking and shape recognition to map a scalable 3d model against the person in the video. From there, the possibilities are pretty wide open to make the person taller, shorter, or fuller in the muscles, breasts, etc.