Tribute to Maria Callas 100th Anniversary in the XR Ecosystem

Press Releases

Nov 30, 2023

European scientists bring Maria Callas to the XR/AI World marking 100 years since the birth of La Divina. Their advances in Artificial Intelligence, CG & 3D Modeling open up new opportunities for creative entrepreneurs.

LOS ANGELES, Nov. 30, 2023 /PRNewswire-PRWeb/ — A Hollywood virtual human pioneer pushes the limits of AI technology as part of an ongoing EU Research project.

“We are entering a new era, where 3D modeling for XR, film and special effects will become obsolete, being replaced by Neural Rendering and Diffusion Models.” by Barnabas Takacs, Ph.D.

“We wanted to test our novel pipeline including Neural Search, Neural Radiance Fields & 3D Gaussian Splatting to see how they bring value to real-life productions, while significantly reducing the effort needed,” said Philipp Schwinger, owner of FFP, a Vienna-based production company working on the project. “We also captured and virtually reconstructed the same Opera House in Budapest, where Angelina Jolie recently filmed a part of her new role about the life of the world-famous opera singer,” he continued.

Maria Callas was reconstructed from 50+ Internet images with the help of AI-based head shape estimation methods, traditional view-based 3D modeling techniques, and generative AI. The researchers also trained a Stable Diffusion model to pose and reimagine the Diva from any angle. “I believe we are entering a new era, where 3D modeling for XR, film, and special effects will become obsolete, being replaced by Neural Rendering and Diffusion Models”, added Barnabas Takacs, Ph.D. heading the research.

The test was one of the many Use Cases within the XReco European project coordinated by Nico Patz from Deutsche Welle. “XReco technologies enable the creation of XR content faster and without specific coding skills,” he said. “Our consortium includes 20 partners from 12 countries (including NVidia, Unity, and RAI, among others) who have joined forces to build a cutting-edge, data-driven XR ecosystem for the entire content industry.”

“Virtual Production will greatly benefit from these emerging technologies,” elaborated further by Roberto Iacoviello, Lead Research Engineer at Radiotelevisione Italiana, who recently showcased their synthetic human of Maria Callas for Next Gen storytelling at IBC in Amsterdam. “The difficulty was to create synthetic humans that accurately mimic human movements and expressions. We were inspired to bridge the gap between the past and present and were intrigued by the technical challenge. By leveraging data from RAI’s extensive archives and collaborating with AI and technical artists, we successfully crafted a realistic synthetic representation of Maria Callas.”

The models and assets are publicly available for art projects and creative industry partners upon request.