By Rudy Helm, Audio and Quality Assurance Tech, Visual Purple, LLC.

Well, it’s been a while, so I thought that we should continue with the theme from my previous blog entry. There are many interesting and fun things to learn. You may recall that we were discussing the notion of your project’s background music (BGM) having the desirable attributes of being copyright free, royalty free, and an original composition at that! Those characteristics undoubtedly appeal to virtual-world developers, makers of cutscenes, trailers and Machinima projects. With the tutorials that we present here, there is no reason why even non-musicians can’t generate musically useful results (even for foreground musical elements, but that discussion is for a later time).

This exercise exhibits a variety of musical styles and embodies them into a single animation sequence. The exhibit portrays a conference room where the attendees are gathered to give their ‘boss man’ a report on the TV and film entertainment industry (actually it’s taken from the 2010 Golden Globes). Embedded in this viewable animation we’ll feature synthetic actors with synthetic speech (TTS voice-overs) as foreground elements (click here for a refresher on the technique). With this test-scene we utilize only 2 TTS male and 1 TTS female voice libraries to cover a cast of 11 adult attendees.

The animation sequence was borrowed from one of our past projects. It had been a full-motion video of a dramatized high-level meeting and for this exhibit it has been ‘cartoon-ized’ to mask logos, etc. The original human VO audio discussed issues about how to save the world, but here we have replaced them with a TTS script chattering about the entertainment world. So, obviously the script is intended to be nonsense; the focus of this little project being on ambient background music production, and less on the TTS actors (but don’t worry, we will have some more in-depth tutorials on TTS production in the near future!).

Now, please view and listen to the animation sequence. Imagine that at this meeting there might be a radio playing in the background for this scenario.

“- Link to”
YouTube Visual Purple When Your Musician is a Robot, Part 3 (Can musical assets be free in a Virtual World?)
The Conference Room exhibit –listen to the musical elements as they each segue. Note how well BGM serves the animation and VO.

In part 4 of this series I will discuss the usage of the music tool. Remember these numbers: 1-4-5? (if not, click here). Essentially, it’s all you need to know about music theory to engage in these tutorials.

[to be continued]

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It recently came to my attention that I refer a lot to Non-Player Characters (or otherwise known as NPCs) within my blog posts. This is simply out of sheer habit. So here you go, an entire post devoted to these second rate characters in virtual worlds.

First, let’s further define a NPC, unlike an Avatar which is human controlled, a Non-Player Character (NPC) has the freedom to wander around in some cases or in other instances may remain as a stationary character. Regardless, of mobility or location, the more ‘intelligent’ a NPC, the greater it’s value in learning, training or entertainment. Intelligently-powered NPC’s have can have many purposes – such as giving a quest to a player, pointing the player in the right direction in the virtual world, etc. Player Characters or PC’s, are the avatar within the virtual world. So now that we have the basic definitions down lets delve a little deeper into what these characters are capable of within a virtual world environment. Questing through intelligent NPC’s brings out a realism that is unseen in virtual worlds sans NPC’s or non-intelligent NPC’s. NPC’s also provide the unique ability to advance the storyline within a virtual world. The Player Character (PC) can thus be guided through certain scenarios without the freedom to get ‘lost’ along the way. The social interaction between the player and non-player characters can be the ultimate key to success especially when training within a virtual world space, ultimately changing the ways that a VW simulation may be played out. The key is engaging the player character in realistic human-like interaction like that found in the real world.

The role of NPCs can range from very simplistic to advanced (carrying a full on conversation with the player). The norm for non-player characters is to wait for the player to involve them in an interaction, normally the NPC will then play through a pre-defined script with the player character. Although this type of interaction does have a predictability about it, it does lead to a higher level of engagement for the player within the virtual world space. These ‘support characters,’ if you will, reinforce the storyline. Although current technologies for NPC’s remain somewhat limited, I see the role of the NPC and capabilities within the virtual world expanding dramatically in the very near future. Bringing a new level of interaction to the virtual world. Of course console and computer- role playing games also have varied forms of NPC’s. Over time the landscape of virtual worlds has changed, from more realistic avatars to better 3-D representations of the real world. It’s only natural and desirable that Non-Player Characters (NPC’s) within virtual worlds will evolve as well.

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The translation for avatar is ‘a form of self’- does your avatar really resemble you down to a “tee?” When entering virtual worlds I have seen customized avatars from robots to pandas and just about everything in between, each one a very unique representation of oneself. Avatar Customization (clothing, body proportions, hair and eye color, etc.) seems to be more and more prevalent nowadays and all too often virtual worlds are largely judged by the robustness of avatar customization options and features.

Should the ‘virtual you’ mimic ‘the real life you?’ Will the upcoming ‘Avatar’ movie change the perception of how people view avatars? What kind of name does the movie, Avatar, give the real avatar in context to a virtual world? Obviously, if someone is not familiar with an avatar character in relation to use within a virtual world one will get the wrong perception. So many questions around an avatar: Can humans really relate to an avatar? A digital rendering- is it realistic enough? Customization- is it really that important? Seriously, how important is it to be able to customize your avatar?

Virtual worlds, social networking sites and video customization are allowing some form of customization to your own and unique profile. As an example some of the faces on the Evolver website reminded me of watching America’s Most Wanted (except for the ranking of most dangerous to society). One thing is for sure, I don’t see myself as wandering around a virtual world clad in an itsy, bitsy, teeny, weenie polka dot bikini anytime soon as pictured on the Evolver home page. The program allows you to share your customized avatar with friends on social networks such as: Facebook, MySpace, Blogger and Friendster.

In recent news was an article describing how many businesses will begin adopting dress codes for avatars that are utilized by company employees. According to Gartner:
“The company predicts that by year-end 2013, 70 percent of businesses will have behavior guidelines and dress codes established for all employees who have avatars associated with the organization.” Understandably, companies don’t want their established name and reputation to be associated with a trashy avatar.

The future of avatars for virtual worlds is promising; I see many more customizing options becoming available soon with wicked realism to actual individuals. As for the term ‘Avatar,’ time will tell as to whether or not the Hollywood movie will change the general public’s perception of what an avatar is.

Related posts on Avatars:
Calling all Avatars
Avatar: A New Addition to Mankind

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A weekly wrap-up on what’s going on within the Virtual World sphere and beyond! Click on any of the below titles to read the full story.

Players May Soon Use One Avatar for Multiple Worlds

Making the virtual world learning experience better

KZero VW registered accounts increase by 92m to 671m in Q3 2009

KZero Updated Universe chart for Q3 2009

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What is your ideal avatar, would it replicate a virtual you? Or not resemble any of your physical traits? I recently attended a Metanomics event that discussed ways in which avatars are perceived. Among the key takeaways from the event is that it is hard to look older in Second Life (something I never really thought of before).

Avatars are able to offer a sense of anonymity to the user; you can replicate yourself to a tee or completely transform the way you want to appear in a virtual world. Are my real name and my own identity over rated? Do others really believe that this is the way I look in real life? We come across this issue quite often when pitching virtual worlds for business use to potential clients. Most organizations have done limited research (if any) on virtual worlds and the perception is that all training products that have avatars will look much like Second Life avatars (whether they are risqué or not I will leave it up to your imagination). Now consider this scenario: When developing a virtual world simulation for a client we placed in a younger “30-something” character in as a lawyer. When we previewed the virtual world (complete with lawyer avatar) to the client- they said that lawyers wouldn’t take the training seriously because most of them are older. (Not to offend the older or younger generations of lawyers- we went in and added some gray hair onto the avatar). So perception can be everything. I’m sure that you have heard the idiom “Don’t judge a book by its cover,” well the same holds true for avatar characters within virtual world environments.

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Ever walk into Second Life and have a feeling of loneliness overcome you? No real feeling of being immersed (almost like walking in on a fantastic party location and not knowing a soul to talk to and mingle with). Depending on your personality you may feel a bit awkward and out of place…Yes, I know if Second Life were a ‘real’ physical place it would roughly be the size of Houston, Texas (but that still doesn’t make up for the fact of feeling lonely).

Coming into a new virtual world/ environment does sometimes present no real sense of presence/ or being for the avatar. The landscape can be gorgeous with interesting buildings and cool places to explore, but no clear path of where you should navigate exists and the environment is often devoid of others. Sure some locations in Second Life use the arrows to guide visitors but is it really enough? With little to no avatar interaction is the visitor drawn in enough to stay and participate in the virtual world? Would you stay?!

However, we are able to turn this bleak scenario around by immersing the participant from the point of entry to the virtual world. Now enter: Non-player characters (NPCs). They are there to guide the virtual world participant to learn and explore the virtual world space and to give the learner/ trainee tools to use and distinct and clear paths to explore. This essentially injects life with believable social interactions into otherwise lonely virtual worlds. Remember, when entering a virtual world for training/learning being social is not at the top of the list; however it is an important aspect to consider. Rather than leaving the trainee to their own devices to discover the virtual world all alone- why not pepper the environment with intelligent NPCs? I think it’s the ‘Second Life’ type of environment that scares some people off when virtual worlds are brought up as a solution for an organization’s training approach. But let’s not let Second Life’s sense of desertion lead to the ‘all virtual worlds have no interaction’ mentality.

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By Rudy Helm, Audio and Quality Assurance Tech, Visual Purple, LLC.

Another element to this task is to lengthen or shorten the TTS words to match the blobs of the human model. Figure 5 depicts the effort to make the TTS utterance of ‘…was a…’ (pronounced as though a contraction, ‘whuzza’) line up on the timeline with John’s clip. Use your DAW’s stretch tool to accomplish this.

Figure 5a- First, make your split points

Figure 5b- Next, use a stretch tool

Let’s continue splitting the TTS clip’s timelines so that we can move each corresponding sound blobs to match, and stretch the words right down to the syllable (Figure 6 shows what it looks like when all words have been synced). Listen to the whole joke, both voices lined up properly.

Figure 6

Here’s where some of you are thinking: Well, the blobs are lined up very nicely, but what about nuances regarding stress and pitch? Isn’t the word ‘lawyer’ as expressed by our human friend, John, not being expressed similarly? John’s lawyer blob is larger (i.e., louder) than the TTS blob. Also, isn’t the word ‘seen’ as expressed by John (in this case the stress is caused not by volume but by its pitch being higher, relatively, from the rest of the phrase) not being emulated by the synthetic actor?

Yes, indeed, so let’s try to fix these two issues. We’ll tackle the loudness point first. Figure 7 shows a Volume Envelope (the horizontal blue-ish line running through the center of the TTS clip in the timeline). With most DAWs with this feature, you can bend the volume envelope to cause increases or decreases in the audio.

Figure 7 – Creating break points within the line bends the envelope

Now let’s tackle the pitch issue with that word, ‘seen’. Figure 8 shows the clip properties dialog box specific to the split-off region of our seen-blob. The highlighted value indicates that the word pitch has been raised four half steps.

Figure 8

Listen to the resulting TTS clip with the treatments per ‘lawyer’ and ‘seen’.

Window dressing

Earlier I mentioned that this is a voice for a talking fish. This fish is contained within a fish tank in a hotel bar. Listen to our talking fish enveloped in a bubbling sound effect. Figure 9 shows the TTS clip, sans John’s clip, and with the fish tank noise clip added.

Figure 9 – Note that a volume envelope has been applied to the bubbles as well.

So, is that it, then? Maybe – maybe not. As if we really did want to add some reality to a talking fish environment, we might consider what we know about how a fish tank effects sound. Occlusion happens. There is a glass barrier between the sound emitter (the talking fish) and the sound receiver (the avatar). So, we could elect to shave off some of the high frequencies from our talking fish. We can accomplish this by choosing the appropriate reverb effect. If you have presets at your disposal, start with a bathroom preset or similar. Try placing the reverb effect before any equalization effects (EQ). We use EQ here to bring out the hi-mid frequencies of the voice to ensure that it is intelligible (you may need to reduce high frequencies as well if you choose a reverb preset that sounds too bright). In this case we are also deploying EQ to remove extreme low frequency rumble (artifacts that commonly get accidentally introduced when using filters in the digital domain). Figure 9 shows this idea. Have a listen to the result.

Figure 10a – Software ‘bathroom’ reverb

Figure 10b – Software EQ module

Conclusion

Can synthetic voice-actors make funny? Humor is a very subjective aspect of human emotion. What’s funny to Samuel isn’t so funny to Mary, and so forth. So maybe the jury is still out on that one. To improve our NPC’s delivery, we’ve had to rely on 3rd-party software to ensure that techniques were carefully deployed. Markup language deployment probably won’t be sufficient for specific tasks like this, where real-time interaction is not a requirement. That’s my best guess, anyway.

You may wonder what to do if you have a project that requires an ensemble of funny voices. Well, as long as you have at least one funny human available to you, that person can be your model for all voices. Then your cast of synthetic actors can be molded to conform to your model’s comedic timing.

How about this scenario: you have a cinematic cut-scene where there are several actors in the movie (or trailer). But your budget can only afford one human voice-actor. Consider recording your one voice actor doing the roles of the entire cast. Then, using the techniques discussed above, create an ensemble of TTS voices and synchronize them in your video editor (NLE) to the synthetic voices to the phrasings and expressions of your one human actor.

In fact, maybe we’ll try to tackle an example of that in my next blog entry. Stay tuned!

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A few posts ago I discussed my Top 10 trends in the Virtual World space for 2009. One raised a few eyebrows: Cross-platform Avatar standardization will continue. Perhaps I should elaborate.

Teleporting avatars from one Virtual World to another…We saw the beginning of this in 2008 between IBM and Linden Lab. Look for more moves like this in the future through VC backed companies and the eight hundred pound gorillas. With the massive use of social media outlets – and more and more people adopting Virtual Worlds into their daily lives – this is not going away! Who wants to have to keep reinventing the wheel in every 3D world? Not me! More than likely the avatars moving from one platform to another will be a hot topic in 2009. Be warned the road to cross-platform avatar standardization may hit a few bumps along the way.

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The New Year is upon us and I can’t resist sharing my predictions for Virtual Worlds in 2009.

Top 10 trends for Virtual Worlds in the public and private spaces as I see it for 2009…
1. Learning in a Virtual World will become in vogue
2. Double-digit adoption across a broad demographic
3. More and more social networks migrating to the Virtual World space
4. More institutions turning to Virtual Worlds (Universities and Colleges building Virtual Campuses & Classrooms/ Virtual Teaching Environments being established)
5. Artificial Intelligence-like behaviors – more buzz around this
6. Backlash against traditional CBT coupled with lower development costs will encourage corporations to pilot Virtual Worlds for training and collaboration
7. Virtual Goods – hot for ‘09
8. Government entities adopting Virtual Worlds as pilot programs (many agencies won’t want to be left out)
9. Beginning to see traction for standards, especially in the enterprise space
10. Cross-platform Avatar standardization will continue

Please post comments on what you see as hot trends in the Virtual World space for 2009.

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The future of Virtual World’s is very bright… Despite Google’s recent announcement that they are closing down Lively at the end of this year, almost all other Virtual Worlds are on the rise. With many new Virtual Worlds currently in the development stage, the Virtual World sector is in its infancy. We are like most other forecasters in believing that Virtual Worlds will be as popular as the Internet is now, within the next 2 to 5 years (there’s a good reason why Vista is 3D-based). These multi-user online spaces have seen many new visitors and adopters to the newly developed technology and applications. Today, many Virtual Worlds are marketed as games; however the future of Virtual Worlds will continue to break into the education and training markets. Although the applications of Virtual Worlds span from being utilized for fun, training, e-learning, and collaborating more and more Virtual Worlds are being introduced as learning tools within the workplace. Virtual Worlds offer a broad range of applications/ uses across all sectors. A lot of the Worlds in the market now function as social spaces. The future of Virtual Worlds looks to transform daily life as we know it whether entering VW’s for business or pleasure. We believe that technology advancements will continue to be introduced in the VW sector and the overall mass adoption of Virtual Worlds will continue across all age groups.

Okay, consider yourself primed on the very basics of VW’s. From here on out, we’ll endeavor to get more specific on features, challenges, implementations, etc…thanks for coming along!

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