Technology company Unity announced it has acquired Ziva Dynamics. Marc Whitten, SVP & GM, Create at Unity, joins Cheddar News' Closing Bell, where he discusses how this move will help his company democratize real-time character creation.

Closing Bell

Unity Acquires Ziva Dynamics, Aims to Make Character Creation Tools More Accessible

Welcome back to Cheddar News earlier today. Technology company Unity announcing it has expanded its suite of real time character creation tools with the acquisition of Ziva Dynamics you have scenes even technology before it's been used in a number of game, movie and television projects including Game of Thrones and Godzilla versus kong. With more on this move is cheddar. Senior reporter Michelle Castelluccio. Thanks ken joining us now is Mark wouldn't. He's S VP and GM of create at Unity. Mark congrats on the acquisition. Can you tell us a little bit more about what Drew Unity does Eva dynamic. Thanks Michelle. It's so great to be here. What's really amazing about Ziva Dynamics is their industry leaders in defamation and machine learning tools that make it easy for artists to create extraordinarily lifelike and amazing characters and creatures in ways that they've never been able to before. And how will this advance Unity's game engine? Well, if you think about the best games in the world, they often have incredible characters and building those characters takes in immense talent and time. And even with all of that, it's been hard to get the level of visual fidelity that we would all expect. But what's amazing about Ziva Dynamics technology is it's capable of rendering things in real time. That before now, you've only seen pre rendered in movies, you know, speaking of rendering in real time. I want to talk about Emma, which was created by Zieba dynamic, how does this work Well with with something like Emma an artist creates a model and then that's uploaded to the cloud where it's trained against extraordinary amounts of data and using that data instead of an artist having to to do complicated rigging and understanding each animation. It uses machine learning to be able to express tens of thousands, over 70,000 different levels of emotion. And the same tools that you're seeing here. An incredibly lifelike human character can be used to build something that's more stylized or a monster or any type of creator than an artist character that an artist could come up with. What kind of practical uses can Emma have besides animation that can exist outside the gaming sphere. Sure, well certainly this technology is being used in lots of different films and movies where it can be make it easier to create lifelike uh computer generated characters and movie sets. But even beyond that, as we think about all sorts of different types of industries wanting to be able to build new three D. Experiences. Being able to interact with a real life human that can sort of show how your clothes might look or how something might be expressed is really important technology. And m as I understand it is a virtual personal assistant or do you see any practical uses for Unity's technology? Even in this customer service space, that's a great example of the type of industry that's looking more and more towards real time three D. Tools to make it easier to build a connection with customers, to be able to have a deeper level of communication, to even be able to share emotional cues back and forth as you're going through customer support and other similar types of use cases. I think you'll see lots of those examples coming out of tools like CVA dynamics and with the things that we're building at Unity. Now there's a lot of talk about the metaverse and what we do know about it though, is that a lot of it has existed or the ideas have been tested out in the gaming world, how can the ability to render digital characters faster, help advance this digital space? It's such a great question. You know, I don't exactly know what the metaverse is going to be or become, but the one thing that's very clear is that it's going to be an extraordinary increase in the amount of three D content that needs to exist in the world. So by providing new tools that let an extra huge number of creators build faster, cheaper, more realistic characters that allows them to drink whatever their vision of the metaverse or a type of experience that might, they might want to exist in a RVR or in other types of experiences. It's extremely important to make those tools accessible to a new generation of artists. Now, there was a recent wired article that talked a lot about how Unity was looking at creating a digital clone of the world. Can you talk a little bit about this concept and why this would make sense? My dog is also interested in looking more normally. It's my dog on these, so I'm right there with you. Yeah, the digital Twin is a great example of using real time three. Um, we believe that whether it's something you're trying to buy, maybe a shoe or a piece of furniture or some clothes or a home or an industrial use case where you're trying to train on something or understand how it is being able to visualize it in real time and three D. So that you can truly understand it is going to be critical for how businesses around the world operate and connect both with their employees and with their customers. Well, definitely something to watch as we move more into this digital space, thanks to Mark Wooden, S. V. P and G and G. M. Of create Unity.