THE Scottish software firm revolutionising digital animation says Brexit may make it harder to find the talent it needs to thrive.
Speech Graphics was founded by computer and linguistics experts at Edinburgh University and caused an international impact with its animated video for rapper Kanye West. Yesterday, the firm launched its latest innovation, the SGX software package capable of generating detailed facial animation from recorded audio.
The software, which works across some of the world’s most-spoken languages, has been used to power the newest instalment in Microsoft’s blockbuster Gears of War series.
Game developers used the system to bring more than 35,000 lines of dialogue to life in the critically acclaimed Gears of War 4, which sold 617,000 copies in its first week of sale.
The result of five years of research and development, the software is so powerful it can automatically animate a character’s eyebrows, eyes, lips, jaw, cheeks and even tongue to “capture the intensity of every syllable”, meaning specialist animators are no longer needed.
It also allows games studios to create different language versions of the same title, providing the same quality of product in Mandarin, Korean, German, French and other tongues without the need for dubbing. Three further global game studios have already snapped up licences, with details about these projects expected to be released in the new year.
The company, which is based in Edinburgh tech incubator CodeBase, the largest facility of its kind in the UK, says it is on track to become the “main provider” of lip sync and facial animation to the video game market.
Michael Berger, above left with fellow Speech Graphics co-founder Gregor Hofer, said: “Automatic, accurate lip sync is one of the holy grails of computer facial animation. Our task is to create the impression that the animated face you see is the source of the sound you hear.
“This illusion is notoriously difficult to achieve – the movements of speech are fast, complex and subtle and the viewer is highly sensitive to any mismatch between face and the voice.”
David Coleman, animation director of Gears of War 4, praised the “robust system”, adding: “SGX goes beyond good lip sync. Speech contains energy and emotion, and that too can be decoded from the voice and synchronised in the face.
“Using all available acoustic information, our algorithms drive not just the mouth but the entire face from audio input, from syllables to scowls.”
The team is also working on an “exciting” project related to the growing field of virtual reality (VR), with details expected to emerge next year. Three more staff are set to join the eight-strong team as a result.
Hofer told The National future work may be hampered by Brexit as the severing of ties with the European Union makes Scotland a less attractive destination for foreign-born software developers.
On the impact of Brexit, Hofer, originally from Austria, said: “Our main market is in America and we get paid in dollars, so right now the pound being so weak actually helps us a lot. All our contracts are now worth 15 per cent more.
“But in the long term, recruiting and things like that might be a challenge. The UK has a lot of development studios.”
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