Iris is a cute looking Red car which can talk, laugh and dance all in real time. The launch saw interaction between Iris the e-puppet and the attending professionals from different fields and professions wherein Iris was answering questions in real time.
The e-puppet is a live 3D animated interactive character that can interact and respond in real time to questions and answers and in full render quality. It has been developed by the Tata Elxsi studio and Pankaj Khandpur (Creative Director, VCL, Tata Elxsi) is the brains behind this unique mascot. The character design of Iris was developed by the team of Tata Elxsi and around 5 artists have worked on it. It‘s fully 3D animated, shaded with thousands of polygons .
Speaking to AnimationXpress.com Pankaj Khandpur shared, "Basically it‘s the interactive tool that we developed. We have taken sort of hardware input and put it on the 3D character and re-created it so you can animate in real time and render in real time. So Iris performs live to audience."
The character of Iris is being performed by an actor all the time to enable the real time interaction but it hasnt been done through regular motion capture. "The original plan was to use very complex motion capture but it turned out to be impractical because of two reasons one it was very expensive and it required lot of space, lot of 3D and lot of set up time," he added.
Iris‘ character is based on Tata Motors‘ Iris vehicle. Tata Motors have come up with original idea. The face of the cars looks almost human like so the team expanded the idea and created lips and eyes.
The main purpose of creating this live interacting e-puppet was the launch of the Tata Motors latest offerings. And it will also be used for the road shows that will happen at multi-centres across India. It will be used wherever they are promoting and selling Tata Motors and for the launch in various towns. It‘s not meant for advertising it‘s more for pre-sale marketing and to be shown to the dealers. It‘s not meant for end customers.
Explaining the difference between Mocap and the technology used for making this e-puppet Pankaj explains, "Traditionally motion capture relies upon certain matters on the body and then grabs data with infrared camera so that data is transferred onto the mocap technology system which is then applied to the 3D character. In principle the technology we have used is mocap but simpler form of mocap and it‘s using other clues that mocap doesn‘t for example - mocap doesn‘t capture voice but this is capturing voices. It captures voice and when you say a,e,i,o,u all those actions and expressions‘ libraries are created. So when you speak it gets projected on the character and it changes the mouth of the character the same way".
Iris, the cute, lovable and happy-to-go-lucky kind of character is a new addition to the long lists of mascots in Indian market but still stands out to be the one of its kind. It can interact with people for a long time unless the actor performing feels exhausted that is.
Because it is real-time and interactive, the e-puppet technology can be used beyond marketing and advertising as well. Real-time motion capture and lip-sync can be used for creating complete animated character projects as well, including episodic television, virtual ‘talk-show‘ hosts etc.