“In college, we were limited to coming up with ideas and showing their potential, but at NCSoft, we are trying to gather the abilities and ideas of many people to create a complete product like a ‘digital human.’” NCSoft released an interview with Lee Je-hee, Chief Research Officer (CRO), newly hired in April, through its official blog and YouTube. CRO Lee Je-hee served as a professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Seoul National University from 2003 to early this year and has been conducting research in the field of computer graphics and animation. In 2019, he succeeded in realizing human musculoskeletal movements using deep learning technology for the first time in the world.
CRO Lee Je-hee has been researching computer graphics and animation while working as a professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Seoul National University for about 20 years from 2003 to early this year. NCSoft created a new CRO position and hired him in April of this year.
The joining of this CRO suggests that virtual human technology that will be incorporated into NCSoft’s games is not far away. In an interview, CRO Lee summarized the state of his research and technology by saying, “The essence of the various research I have conducted over the past 30 years has been the exploration of the topic ‘how people move.’”
In particular, great interest was expressed in how virtual gaming technology would interact with game users and to what extent there were such possibilities.
He emphasized, “Virtual human technology in the true sense must be an object that goes beyond resembling a person’s appearance and can communicate with ‘me’, read and react to my facial expressions, and remember and interact with me.”
He continued, “The animation field in games has not made much technological progress over the past 20 years compared to the modeling and rendering fields. However, as AI technology, including deep learning, develops, animation technology is also facing a major change.” Previously, animators had connected and implemented movement-captured data one by one, but in the future, machine learning technology will be able to streamline the series of processes of collecting data and implementing it on a computer, he explains.
Lastly, CRO Lee said, “For the past 20 years, games have focused on how realistically modeling the real world is with ‘reproduction’ technologies such as capture and scanning.” “It is important to know how the real world and the imaginary world on top of it can interact, and how to model this,” he said.
Source: Pangyo Techno Valley Official Newsroom
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