Read the interview with Nikolaos Zioulis and his winning proposal: SNAP – Scalable Neural Articulated Representations
Nikolaos and Moverse
Nikolaos Zioulis is the CTO of Moverse and is primarily responsible for overseeing the company’s technology and its evolution. He is an active computer vision and graphics researcher with experience in volumetric capture, AI and 3D humans.
Moverse is a startup committed to accelerating 3D character animation workflows. Through its studio and portal, it complements creatives with a unified and end-to-end toolset for animated 3D content creation. Following the latest technological developments, Moverse is quickly evolving, moving beyond motion capture to generative 3D animation and holistic performance capture.
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Can you give a brief overview of your winning proposal?
What are its key objectives and innovative aspects?
The representation of humans in digital environments is critical for creating lifelike characters or avatars. While contemporary technology has already pushed the limits of what is possible, the latest advances in view synthesis can improve content creation rates and accessibility. Brands and creators already benefit from said advances, but emerging uses cases for presence and communication have not yet been impacted due to the technical challenges imposed by their real-time nature.
As these new digital human representations highly align with Moverse’s technology, our goal with SNAP in this project is to explore the possibilities of the intersection between markerless motion capture and modern view synthesis. This will allow us to demonstrate innovative interactive experiences and scratch the surface of future communication mediums.
What motivated you to apply for the SPIRIT Open Call?
The SPIRIT consortium comprises leading European companies and academia having access to state-of-the-art technology and infrastructure. The project’s mission is adjacent to our vision as a company, making the benefits of this collaboration between Moverse and SPIRIT mutual.
Delivering novel interactive and participatory quasi-digital experiences is a modern driver for audience engagement and brand development. It is also one of Moverse’s technological offerings as well as a SPIRIT use-case.
How do you envision this project making an impact?
Creators need tools that can scale in terms of quality, quantity and diversity. This has been the driver behind the Moverse team. Yet their outputs and needs are also diverse. Through this project, Moverse will pursue an important technology integration to deliver a new ubiquitous format. By adapting to the creators’ needs, this new format will enable and help them better address their content’s diversity requirements. The novelty and heterogeneity of the format will additionally be a valuable validation of the SPIRIT platform and its capabilities.