"Lionhead founder and famed game designer Peter Molyneux took the stage at Microsoft's E3 press conference to demonstrate "Milo," a virtual boy who interacts with players via the Project Natal motion camera. After introducing the project, Molyneux presented a video of a Lionhead staffer speaking with Milo, who reacted to what she said -- and even wrote on a piece of paper held up to the screen ... like a real person." http://www.joystiq.com/2009/06/01/peter-molyneux-shows-milo-for-project-natal/ And the amazing video: http://www.gametrailers.com/video/e3-09-lionhead-milo/50016 So, what do you all think? Personally, this is some amazing tech. I'm just curious on how this will all work without fault, if it can that is.
Unless he has distilled pure genius and fed it to all of his employees that all just smoke and mirrors. It was programmed with that scene in mind to make it look like it works flawlessly, in reality, it won't work anywhere near that well. Still, it's impressive
Hehe that Molyneux guy.... They put on a fun show but yeah I agree with you both. It was just a show, but it was some nice tech in there. When he was talking about Claire and said she isn't acting, that was a big fat lie. She freaked out when the virtual boy inside the TV jumped... so... either she was acting or she needs to lay off the drugs. Also the boy might be reacting to her words but it's quite easy to do that when it's so focused. He might have been programmed to respond to just several sentences, so if someone else walked in to the room and said "Hi Milo, is the weather nice in your virtual world?" he would probably just stare blankly. Or produce a blue screen of death. There is some pretty nice tech there though. I like the infra red (or whatever) thing which picks up movement. Not a new idea but it's the first time I've seen one with that kind of scope and that works. I remember everyone drooling over the Minority Report concept of moving documents around by waving your arms, so this could do that and probably a lot more. For gaming and working it could be really good. The interaction thing is good but I am a bit sceptical of that. He promised us great things with the creatures in Black and White, but really they didn't develop a whole lot. You could tickle them or you could smack them in the face and all it really did was tweak their alignment. They weren't the modern equivalent of a virtual ET type character I think a lot of people hoped they would be. I suspect this is just an extension of that concept. Instead of a creature responding to mouse movements, replace the creature with a little boy and replace the mouse movements with voice commands. Again not really a new concept, there has been speech to text software for a long time and some of it is very good once you have trained it to understand your voice. If they could include that in a game it could be interesting to talk to characters in games instead of clicking on dialogue options, but it's also pretty gimmicky when I think about it. If I had the choice of playing the upcoming Dragon Age with dialogue options, or having to actually speak at my monitor, I would definitely go for the dialogue options. I like that they think outside the box a bit though and can produce some interesting little demonstrations, but I wish he would just get busy making killer games instead I loved pretty much everything he did when he was at Bullfrog, but I don't really like anything he has done since Lionhead started.
They make robots that react like humans when they participate in a conversation with an actual person. They created them to demonstrate real human emotions. For example, if a person participating in the conversation yelled at the robot, the robot would frown and react to what was said. I can't remember where I saw this demonstration. This is obviously staged a bit. But I don't think they're just shooting for the stars. It will be interesting to see this system either prevail, or fail.
Well that's the thing, here they don't have the same systems as a robot like that, because the people who make those kind of things are incredibly clever and they require a lot of horsepower, they're just pretending they do. It's like that Bit/CPC article on Total War AI the other month, it was all about how the AI in a computer game isn't really AI at all, it's just they program it so it seems like it is. There's also the problem that text to speech is no-where near as good as that, they would have to record thousands of hours of dialogue to get all the words and different ways of saying the words emotionally. Even then, it would still sound disjointed. So as I said before, either Pete hires some of the finest minds in the world and has managed to crack several major problems that scientists have been trying to solve for decades, or this is all staged.
It was never meant to be about having a fluent dialogue with a virtual person, but the whole point was to show how Milo can react to and show emotions and gestures. Peter Molyneux was very clear about this and even 'admits' that it uses tricks. If it really was that clever don't you guys suppose the world would be making a much bigger deal about this...? I was quite impressed tbh and look forward to seeing the full game and what it's like.
I wonder what the limit on dialogue and gestures is? I bet you couldn't call him a t**t and punch him in the face, then drown him in the lake.
You can't say your optimistic, but then admit that you're expecting disappointment Anyways... a BJ just tricks your parts into thinking it's doing the real thing, but it still feels great Point being that it doesn't really matter if it's tricks that make it seem like it's responding. The real thing just isn't realistic at this point, so I'll settle for 3rd base... technologically speaking, that is.
