Digital Domain Head of Software R&D Doug Roble, and for the first time, his virtual avatar DigiDoug, presented a talk at TED2019 on what it takes to create a digital human. DigiDoug is the industry-leading work of the Digital Human Group, a unit within global visual effects studio Digital Domain overseen by VFX industry veterans Darren Hendler and Doug Roble. The group is focused on the creation of digital humans, creatures and characters for feature films, live real time events and new technology applications. 

Digital Domain and Digital Human Group partners involved with the creation of DigiDoug include Vision and Graphics Lab, USC Institute for Creative Technologies, to capture Doug’s facial detail in high resolution Unreal Engine from Epic Games, the real time engine used to render DigiDoug and Elbor NVIDIA, for graphics processing units for rendering and machine learning Dimensional Imaging(DI4D™), to capture Doug’s facial movements Xsens, a motion capture system to capture Doug’s body movements IKINEMA, streams, retargets and cleans Doug’s body performance and synchronises movements onto DigiDoug and Elbor in real-time Manus VR, gloves used to capture Doug’s hand and finger movements in real time Fox VFX Lab, the helmet camera system to capture data for training and use on stage for real time performance. To view Doug Roble’s 2019 TED talk, and his live digital human DigiDoug: go.ted.com/dougroble