Recent years have seen a full-on explosion of technology devoted to the creation of high-fidelity digital humans for industries including film, games and visualisation. This list of uses is by no means exhaustive as the world has started to see an upsurge in digital humans being used across the board, including on social media, as chatbot alternatives and in training videos.
The increasing popularity of game engines has led to the creation of digital humans that can be used across these industries, rather than having to create something from scratch for each end purpose. The same digital humans can be rendered at ultra-high resolution for a film, display lifelike movement in a game context, and be interacted with on social media.
Two companies appear to be emerging as front runners in the race for the digital humans top spot: Epic Games and Unity Technologies. The progression, in recent years, has been rapid and displayed most clearly in Unity's recent demo works. In a first attempt, for them, to create a new generation of digital humans. By using scanning technology, they were able to create an amazingly realistic look through high-quality textures and animated movements. The whole process involved creating a completely new pipeline, and even though the results were impressive, the necessary steps and skills required were still beyond most artists.
