Building 3D and avatars — a recap

3 innovation and digital news in 1 minute. Every Monday. Episode 295

News 1. Maya — put on the Microsoft conference stage

Autodesk software has a 3D avatar builder solution. It has been “put on stage” at the Microsoft Build 2022 developer conference last week. Maya is a platform with tools like Bifros (one environment and explosion, storms etc.) or Character Set-up (skeleton and human movement). Maya belongs to the software giant Autodesk. Opinion: The demo at the Build conference was above all about AI-based coding, 3D building in no-code mode. One writes a text describing the instruction, and the code is written automatically.

A very impressive function on Maya of what Microsoft called “co-pilot”.

News 2. Light and magic by Lucas

Industrial Light & Magic is Georges Lucas’s studio that builds the Abba-tar, the avatar for for the new Abba tour. The concert series started with drums last Thursday. A huge effort with hundreds of hours for building the group member avatars, months of work to animate the whole concert of 90 minutes. It happens in partnership with Zurich based Disney Research Studios. Soon with a documentary called Light & Magic on Disney+. Opinion: The concert will kick-off avatars coming into the mainstream. Many are wondering how many use cases there will be for avatars. Gaming is the major one. Concert another. Collaboration is the next one, presented by Microsoft for Teams at the latest Build 2022 conference.

Avatars go mass-market.

News 3. USD by Pixar — open source

Pixar has its own software for building 3D scene, for the cinema USD stands for Universal Scene Description, a collaborative software platform. User can create asset definitions with geometric, material, lighting, and other properties — key to a 3D scene building. Opinion: USD is interchange of data and is mainly an open-source framework, found on GitHub. It is largely the foundation of the NVIDIA Omniverse metaverse platform. As well as Maya.

USD at the basis of everything 3D.

Author is the research team (10 trend scouters) at specialist Space and Lemon Innovations (Hamburg, Berlin) — scouting innovations in main tech geographies, AI development, virtual worlds and e-commerce. Excerpts of research are gathered here in original weekly news since 2016, always with an opinion — no re-write of TechCrunch.

Come back next Monday and share your opinion.