Los Angeles - Big Stage Entertainment Inc., a media technology company that enables consumers to project themselves photo-realistically into digital environments, has launched BigStage.com, where anyone can create a free, animated 3D "Digital You” for instant projection into the online landscape.
Called an @ctor, the Digital You can be customized with accessories and inserted into a growing selection of movie scenes, TV clips, music videos, virtual worlds, social networks, still images, video games, advertisements, and more to share with friends, family, and colleagues.
“The Web has revolutionized human interaction, but until now, it has lacked the means to showcase our visual identities and individuality in vivid, portable form across the digital realm,” says Phil Ressler, Big Stage Entertainment CEO. “After years of extensive research and customization, Big Stage Entertainment is making complex 3D modeling technology accessible for everyone to create a realistic, animated facial clone of themselves for the very first time. This experience is the next evolutionary step in transforming your online presence from faceless to ‘The Digital You.’”
On BigStage.com, anyone can create an animated 3D model of their face for free by using one to three photos taken with a digital camera. Big Stage Entertainment’s proprietary software allows users to upload these photos to BigStage.com, where the company’s patented technology maps the contours of the face to produce a high-fidelity 3D model in minutes. Invisible to users, the complex 3D data is processed to develop an accurate and animated personal digital clone. Users can create an unlimited number of literal and fantasy @ctors on BigStage.com.
To create and view @ctors in action, users need to install the Big Stage Media Player. Once the player is installed, @ctors can be styled with accessories including hair, eyeglasses, hats, and clothing, and can be projected into a variety of digital media experiences, including social networks, online communities, video clips, backgrounds, still images, greetings and more. Friends’ @ctors can also be placed into content, which is shareable via e-mail forwarding and Web site embeds, in addition to saving to social networks and porting to YouTube by video capture.
The Big Stage Entertainment R&D team focused on extracting the quality and accuracy of complex 3D scanning technology, previously only available to production houses and animation companies, to offer it to any consumer with a digital camera through a free, fun, and easy-to-use browser platform.
BigStage.com users are required to install the free Big Stage Media Player on their PC to experience BigStage.com. System requirements are a PC running the Microsoft Windows XP or Microsoft Vista operating system, as well as the Firefox 2+ or Internet Explorer 6+ Web browsers. Intel-based Mac users can also run the Big Stage Media Player on Windows/Bootcamp. Older Macintosh-based Windows emulation applications may have higher instances of problems with the Big Stage Media Player. A Mac OS version of the Big Stage Media Player is planned but not yet scheduled.