Generating high-fidelity real-time animated sequences of photorealistic 3D head avatars is important for many graphics applications, including immersive telepresence and movies. This is a challenging problem particularly when rendering digital avatar close-ups for showing character's facial microfeatures and expressions. To capture the expressive, detailed nature of human heads, including skin furrowing and finer-scale facial movements, we propose to couple locally-defined facial expressions with 3D Gaussian splatting to enable creating ultra-high fidelity, expressive and photorealistic 3D head avatars. In contrast to previous works that operate on a global expression space, we condition our avatar's dynamics on patch-based local expression features and synthesize 3D Gaussians at a patch level. In particular, we leverage a patch-based geometric 3D face model to extract patch expressions and learn how to translate these into local dynamic skin appearance and motion by coupling the patches with anchor points of Scaffold-GS, a recent hierarchical scene representation. These anchors are then used to synthesize 3D Gaussians on-the-fly, conditioned by patch-expressions and viewing direction. We employ color-based densification and progressive training to obtain high-quality results and faster convergence for high resolution 3K training images. By leveraging patch-level expressions, ScaffoldAvatar consistently achieves state-of-the-art performance with visually natural motion, while encompassing diverse facial expressions and styles in real time.

He does admit, though, that not everyone has his studio's history, nor his personality. "I am a - what do you say? - a different breed," says Josef. When he was directing his first game, Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons, feedback from some early playtests was "super bad". "I'm like, they're wrong, they're wrong, because I know it's great," he says. He's spoken before about resisting pressure to put micro-transactions - in-game purchases - in his projects, and is uncompromising despite his studio's close relationship with EA, one of the world's biggest publishers.

Alan Wake II is a fantastic game. It tells a twisted, serpentine story of paranormal murder, shifting realities and demonic possession, with two brooding investigators at its core. Developers at Remedy Entertainment are masters of mood and Alan Wake II is their latest showpiece, highlighting the studio's eye for psychedelic terror and complex mysteries. This game is packed with monsters, ghosts, cults, Old Gods, rock operas and mind-bending perspective swaps. And on top of all that, its character models and set pieces are absolutely gorgeous.

The Monitor is a weekly column devoted to everything happening in the WIRED world of culture, from movies to memes, TV to Twitter. Earlier this week, on the red (technically striped) carpet of the Met Gala, The Dropout star Amanda Seyfried answered a tough question: What did she think about the then-impending Writers Guild of America strike? Wearing an elegant Oscar de La Renta dress made with 80,000 gold and platinum bugle beads, she told a Variety reporter that everything she'd heard from writer friends indicated they would picket if they couldn't reach an agreement with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers. Poised, draped in priceless garments and jewels, she remained firm. "I don't get what the problem is," she said.

Visa is a world leader in digital payments, facilitating more than 215 billion payments transactions between consumers, merchants, financial institutions and government entities across more than 200 countries and territories each year. Our mission is to connect the world through the most innovative, convenient, reliable and secure payments network, enabling individuals, businesses and economies to thrive. When you join Visa, you join a culture of purpose and belonging – where your growth is priority, your identity is embraced, and the work you do matters. We believe that economies that include everyone everywhere, uplift everyone everywhere. Your work will have a direct impact on billions of people around the world – helping unlock financial access to enable the future of money movement.

Developing web interfaces to interact with a machine learning (ML) model is a tedious task. With Streamlit, developing demo applications for your ML solution is easy. Streamlit is an open-source Python library that makes it easy to create and share web apps for ML and data science. As a data scientist, you may want to showcase your findings for a dataset, or deploy a trained model. Streamlit applications are useful for presenting progress on a project to your team, gaining and sharing insights to your managers, and even getting feedback from customers.

It's early Monday morning for most of you, but the work week started early for Engadget, with Xbox's big Summer Game Fest showing. Given how many game studios Microsoft now has for its consoles and game streaming service, we were expecting a whole bunch of announcements, trailers and things to have strong opinions on. There were plenty of familiar Xbox reveals -- more Forza announcements, for one -- as well as major updates from Blizzard Activision (soon to be part of the Microsoft family) regarding Overwatch 2 (free to play!) and Diablo IV. Bethesda finally had something more substantial to reveal for its next big game, Starfield. A first look into the game had a lot of No Man's Sky vibes, but with this studio's flair for glossy world-building and narrative.

At today's Google Cloud Applied ML Summit, the search and enterprise IT giant revealed a new group of product features and technology partnerships designed to help users create, deploy, manage and maintain machine learning (ML) models in production faster and more efficiently. The company's AI development environment, Vertex AI, launched a year ago at the Google I/O 21 conference, is the home base for all of the updates. This is a managed ML platform designed to enable developers to speed up the deployment and maintenance of their AI models. A central new addition to Vertex AI is its Prediction Service. In the graph data space, Google introduced a data partnership with Neo4j that connects graph-based machine learning models.

Onfido has added four new products to its biometrics and artificial intelligence (AI)-powered identity verification and authentication service known as the'Real Identity Platform,' promising superior results and performance. The update is comprised of the Onfido Verification Suite, Onfido Studio, Onfido Smart Capture, and Onfido Atlas AI. The Verification Suite is a curated library of trusted data sources and identity verification services to offer a user experience tailored around specific fraud and regulatory use cases, compliance requirements, global needs, risk appetite, and business objectives. It is integrated into Onfido's document and biometric identity verification solution and carries trusted data verification sources like a U.S. social security number and sanctions watchlist, and fraud detection verification through geolocation and phone verification among other options. Studio is described as an orchestration software built around a no-code platform and analytics tools for businesses.

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