I’LL BE IN MY TRAILER
The director of a new cartoon is grappling with a problem rarely encountered by animators—a cast of unruly actors endowed with artificial intelligence and minds of their own.
Texas-based Michael Burns makes “machinima” films, in which a video game’s 3D environment is used as a ready-made set (91av, 25 October 2003, p 28). Burns already uses Halo, a traditional “shoot-’em-up” style 3D game, to create an internet satire called Red versus Blue, which follows the adventures of robotic soldiers. But his latest soap-opera show, The Strangerhood, which debuted two weeks ago, is filmed using the games engine of the more homely smash-hit game Sims 2.
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But unlike Halo, where a player has full control over a character, the Sims characters only do as a player instructs if they have been “emotionally primed” first. For example, a female character will not kiss a male one unless she has already been out on a few “dates”.
So Burns is finding it takes some 60 hours just to create a single 10-minute episode, because he has to prime characters beforehand – sending them on dates for instance, off camera. Characters are also disrupting rehearsals by going to the toilet unexpectedly or answering a knock at the door from the garbage collector.
TEXTING By VOICE
If you want to thank a chatty friend for lunch verbally but want to avoid getting sucked into a two-hour conversation, the perfect technology is coming to mobile phones. Voice-SMS software allows you to send a voice message to another phone without running the risk of someone answering it. The software was launched last Monday on Samsung phones sold by the US cellular network Sprint.
Although office networks already allow you to send voicemail instead of speaking to someone, this is the first time it has been available on mobiles. The message can be up to two minutes long and downloads directly onto a receiver’s phone, if they have the right software. Otherwise it is routed over the internet to a server, and a text message tells the recipient which number to call to retrieve it. It can also be sent to an email address.
“Speaking a message is a lot quicker than typing an SMS,” says Doug Van Kirk of Core Mobility in Palo Alto, California, which sells the software to Sprint.
