Bandai Namco Partners With ACES To Research AI-Driven Character Animation

Today Bandai Namco announced with a press release a partnership with Japanese AI startup ACES in the field of character animation.

The project, helmed by the research branch of Bandai Namco, aims to achieve a more natural and complex level of animation for characters, which the audience can more easily empathize with. This would increase the value of games and videos. In addition to that, by enhancing communication between users online, including within a metaverse, it’s possible to create new forms of entertainment.

The point is to use an AI technology named Motion Style Transfer that decomposes motion into its content and style. The content can for example be “walking” and the style “happily.” You can then add the style to the content, creating a new animation that would be walking happily, providing more nuance.

To create this system, a large character motion dataset is needed. Combining the know-how of the two companies, they’re capturing professional performers with a wide variety of emotions, genders, age ranges, etcetera.

At the moment, there is no information on which projects Bandai Namco intends to use the results of this project, but it certainly sounds interesting. We’ll have to wait and see what comes out of this.