MANCHESTER, UK — Cubic Motion (www.cubicmotion.com) has announced a major hardware update to Persona, the technology behind high-fidelity digital humans for video games, films, broadcast media and immersive technologies.
Persona is known for bringing to life characters such as Siren, Meet Mike and Akali, and can be used to capture and translate an actor's performance onto a computer-generated counterpart. This enables immediate animation in realtime engines such as Epic’s Unreal 4. Persona’s core technology also drives facial animation for the game characters seen in Marvel’s Spiderman, God of War and Anthem.
“Persona continually evolves to deliver the world’s best capture and live animation solution,” says Steve Caulkin, CTO at Cubic Motion. This new release, which makes the hardware even more actor-friendly, is especially significant for immediate broadcast and live events.”
Many of the improvements to Persona are based on customer feedback, gathered since its initial release in April 2019. Persona’s latest update focuses on performer flexibility and ease-of-use. Most significantly, the helmet-mounted camera system (HMC) and on-body animation system are now 70 percent smaller, going from 2.3kg to 1.25kg.
Additional features include a quick-release on-body mounting system for rapid setup and ease of use; a battery run time of 1.5 hours and the ability to infinitely hot-swap batteries; a new physical record button for quick, manual capture in emergency situations; and LED indicators that allow everyone on-set to monitor whether the system is idle, recording or streaming to UE4. There is also now basic audio recording capability to aid animation quality and allow for quick turn around on-set.
Persona’s update is now available.