Hm...it sounds very interesting, but I'm a bit confused about the result I see in the video. As you said, it's not realistic at all, he doesn't respond to impacts naturally, nor regains balance in a believeable way...his limbs bend in quite peculiar and...scary ways in order to compensate. At first I thought a system like this would be a great addition in sports games, by making realistic responses to input and interactions, but if it's like in a video it wouldn't work. Unless you can in fact make it completely realistic, but chose not to demonstrate that in the video. In its current form, what would be its application in games?

Some of the omissions from his current iteration:
* No joint constraints
* No correction force constraints
* His controller doesn't ever shut off, thus disallowing "death". (Deliberate for this video.)

It's all mainly a question of time. As these things come in, it'll become much more effective in actual game environments.

Our simplest use case is this -- imagine a shooter against AI controlled enemies. Current shooter tactics are generally "headshot him". Imagine instead that a hit to the arm throws his aim sideways -- possibly hitting his friends in the process. A hit to his leg brings him to his knees, stopping him in his tracks. And these aren't baked animations to put in, but rather physical responses to physical forces.

Ah, ok, I understand now :) The shooter use case sounds totally awesome, it seems like it could completely change how some genres are played! Good luck!

Hello Promit,

Nice work, it looks like an interesting technology. As you mentioned above, there are clearly different constraints that aren't currently in the simulation. The part that seemed strange to me was that the actor could get nailed in the head, his head would flop sideways, but then both feet were on the side of his center of gravity away from his head and he didn't fall down or quickly move a foot to catch his balance.

Is the controller set up to actually keep the actor's balance, or is this more for a reaction from the limbs of the actor without regards to keeping his balance? In either case, if you can make it compensate for balance then I think it would be a fantastic middleware. Do you have a website set up, or some schedule for availability or pricing that you have in mind?

The system is not trying to maintain balance, actually. Balance is a separate problem entirely. A very important problem, certainly, but that is a well researched field with gobs of literature on the subject in the various archives of ACM and IEEE. What ours does is to maintain and return to an animation in a physically plausible way.

We do want to eventually be able to do full balance based systems, and it's certainly possible. It is, however, going to take time. Possibly a lot of time. What we have is really something that maintains animations under perturbation. Balance involves changing the underlying animation, and once you've done that in a reasonable way we can drive the physical simulation using the altered animation.

Licensing/availability continues to be an open question based on what people say next week and how much work we have to reach production ready status. And what business deals are available, of course.