Generative Animation and Emotes with Yassine Tahi, Kinetix CEO

One of the fastest growing areas of creative expression in games has been the emotes and animations you can apply to your character in games like Fortnite. Yassine Tahi saw this realm of self-expression coming, and created a platform that democratizes the creation of character animations.

With Kinetix, individual creators can capture movement and make their avatar animations available through a marketplace—and end-users can invoke them through text-to-animation generative prompting. This requires a huge number of challenging technology problems to be solved:

• Motion capture with a normal camera that maps to the character rig

• Adjusting animation to the geometry and physics of an environment

• Labeling the data in a way that generative AI technology can make use of it

• Making animations interoperable across different games, virtual worlds and metaverse platforms.
  

If you prefer to listen to the podcast, you can also listen to the conversation with Yassine Tahi here (although I think this is a good one to watch—some of the examples of video animation we included are worth viewing!)

Show Notes

Yassine’s company can be found at Kinetix.tech.

is currently partnering with some of these platforms and products:

• Inworld — character AI platform

• Zepeto — avatar-centric gaming and interactive platform

• The Sandbox — voxel-based metaverse platform

• NextDancer — game with dancing movement at its core

One of the related research papers Jon brought up was PADL (Language-directed, Physics-based character control). Watch the animation examples from PADL in this video: