I have this vague suspicion that low-fidelity art (xkcd cartoons, south park/rick and morty style animations) is increasingly harder to do than realistic, high-fidelity art
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Computers and automation make 2 things easy -- procedurally generating from simple geometric-primitive marionettes or motion/camera capture based re-construction. But stylized low-fi takes a human I think.
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This thought has been bugging me every since the metaverse keynote. All other corporate-ish affect/aesthetics problems aside, it's clear that stylized low-fi is actually hard.
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This makes sense because that style is more metaphoric than literal. You sense for eg. that the Rick and Morty aesthetic is a slightly paranoid, spiky/jaggedy style... more kiki than bouba.
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I think machine learning will learn to extrapolate once you provide enough keyframes and stuff, but as with text, interpolating between endpoints is harder than simply forward-search extrapolate.
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I've had a few false starts with trying to learn animation, but invariably things stall when I realize the easy stuff is stuff that's the equivalent of stock photography. Expensive hardware and software making up for human taste/style.
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Over the years, I've test-driven a few things that claim to allow for click-and-drag template based animation, but invariably it's horrible. You get a sort of canned look.
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I think it works in games, because designers can design a whole look for the world, with a harmonized set of avatar building tools. But if you're trying to tell your own story and need a look that matches, as opposed to play out someone else's game story, it doesn't work.
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I don't know much about the field, but I think this is why we haven't seen an explosion of low-fi stylized animated shows. They're still labor intensive compared to the more photorealistic things (which we don't enjoy as much so are not as popular).
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My sense is that this might cripple metaverse ideas. Everything we saw yesterday had either the canned procedurally generated stock-marionette look or game-world look or realistic look. But a true metaverse would need to allow for easy creation of stylized low-fi.
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Possibly minecraft and roblox type environments point to the future better? I haven't had a computer capable of handling demanding graphics for a while, so when I get my new macbook pro, I'll be doing a bunch of exploring.
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Anyhow, a day later, I think Facebook will win all the battles, but lose the war. They'll build many of the right pieces of pioneering hardware, but their overall vision of how it comes together is obviously ughs. It's even less compelling than Second Life was 14 years ago.
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I've had the first version of the oculus quest and enjoyed maybe 15-20 hours on it. Some of the games are great. Got bored of beat saber after a few sessions because I'm not big on music, but liked games like Moss, and my favorite The Room.
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But games are in some sense the easy, low-hanging fruit. They've worked since Pong. The purpose-driven presence makes up for shortcomings elsewhere. The hard part is open world stuff. The Quest was really underwhelming for that sort of thing (rec room, the basic home zone)
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Yeah exactly. Geocities-aesthetic. You actually want a colorful chaos of bad ads, page counters, flashing fonts and other bullshit while the thing is taking shape. It's almost a pre-aesthetic. twitter.com/hondanhon/stat
This Tweet is unavailable.
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I'd actually love the Futurama satirical vision of the metaverse. It's full of ads and has a 90s geocities aesthetic.
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On net, I think whatever the hell FB does will be good. The cringe stuff will fail, the good stuff will remain, and they're pragmatic and money minded enough to kinda let it loose in a way that works. It's a big enough bet that it won't succeed or fail as a monolith.
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Something like La Linea is kinda my north star when it comes to animation
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Now this is a good seed for a metaverse youtube.com/watch?v=I86bXh
literally an infinite 1-d line but handled with real vision
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