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Decades ago, Steve Perlman’s technology helped usher in an era in which figures of the Hollywood imagination felt increasingly authentic.

Now, Mark Zuckerberg and other technologists dream of a future where we spend most of our time in immersive digital worlds. “meta universe” And Perlman has advice for metaverse creators: Focus on the face.

What Perlman means is that in movies and sophisticated video games, ingenious technology and creative professionals come together to create increasingly realistic virtual creatures. They do this by focusing on detailed facial expressions and body movements.

think about my goal From the “Lord of the Rings” movies, many Marvel movie superheroes or Brad Pitt as Benjamin Button reverse ages. They are not real, but we can connect with them and their feelings.

Perlman, a longtime inventor who also helped develop digital video technology at Apple, said what he’s seen so far from the metaverse is flat compared to the Hollywood and video game characters who are completely flesh and blood. He says technologists should be laser-focused on recreating the human face and emotional expression. This is an extremely difficult technology, but Perlman says it must be overcome to give virtual interactions a sense of intimacy.

“The face is the most subtly expressed part of the body,” Perlman told me. “And the face is a part of the body that no VR/XR headset can fully capture,” he said. virtual reality glasses and similar technologies Snap’s Glasses which mixes digital images with the real world – often known by the umbrella term “augmented reality” or XR.

This is just one person’s opinion, and Perlman is not an indifferent observer. He is working on a wireless technology that he believes is a necessary first step for the metaverse or other immersive virtual interactions.

I wanted to speak with Perlman to learn lessons from the long marriage of technology and imagination in Hollywood and beyond. Even if the metastore never goes away, we spend more time interacting through screens and looking for more authentic ways to connect. It is both a technological and a human challenge.

Perlman has a history of helping bring virtual characters to life. In the mid-2000s, his attempt was a leap this helped us feel connected to the two-dimensional characters. this Mova Contour system He used highlighter makeup on the actors’ faces and custom camera hardware and software to convert these performances into computer data.

These and similar approaches, now typically referred to as motion capture, have become quite common in movies and complex video games to create fantasies that feel realistic. Those of us who laugh and cry at non-human characters owe it to Perlman and other technologists. (Perlman’s firm was involved in a lawsuit alleging it improperly profited from other companies’ intellectual property.)

If you have tried virtual worlds such as Fortnite, second life or Meta’s Horizon WorldsYou know the digital assets out there don’t look or feel human yet. They are cartoonish and sometimes people in the metaverse don’t have legs. For now, no problem. But Perlman says that for immersive digital worlds to be captured, metaverse people must feel like human beings.

“In my view, the metaverse gets interesting when it’s at least as good as today’s advanced video games, and possibly even better,” he said. “It won’t have broad appeal until it becomes a human universe.”

This is where Perlman dreams of playing a role. he has company worked for years It’s on a wireless technology that promises to process a range of digital information, including virtual reality, and translate the head movement of someone wearing VR glasses into the same movement on the screen in fractions of a second.

We’ll see if Perlman’s latest invention will prove successful, but creative ideas have a long history. usually boring technology inventions.

Without Amazon’s cloud computing service and others like it, there There would be no iPhone age. Many of the technologies we use daily would not be possible without advances in shrinking computer chip components or embedding GPS in every smartphone.

Perlman looks back at her work with Hollywood characters and hopes that a similar breakthrough is possible for the virtual humans we can feel in our bones this decade.

Before you go …

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  Regarding The Atlantic in 2015: “The phone used to be really greatpartly due to the use case and partly to the nature of the device we call the ‘telephone’, especially the handset,” wrote Ian Bogost. (Subscription may be required.)

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