Page 38 - AVN August 2017

LIGHTS, CAMERA
PLAYING UP THE REALITY
On the set with CamasutraVR
“Capturing a photo-real still is no big deal; you can see how quick it processes; you can
see it within a couple of hours,” Adam explained. “However, adding motion is where it
becomes tricky because there’s a lot of things we need to simulate: a little bit of eye contact
that gives you the feeling of it being live; a little bit of subsurface scattering that you have in
your skin; the hairs that move; the formations, the skin and muscle deformation—that’s a
really big deal, so we’ve tried a couple of different things.
“We spent quite a bit of time digitizing Anikka Albrite’s butt,” he continued. “We put the
tracking markers on it, we filmed it in slow motion; we simulated it. We do a full-body and
hand motion capture that basically gives us the skeletal movement and the finger movement
of the models. Then we do multiple exposures to make sure we get the flesh deformations of
the geometry right, and on top of that, we capture the facial expressions with a microphone
but also with a helmet that has a camera mounted at the front with a fisheye lens which runs
at a high frame rate, and that gives us the expressions that we need. It’s called ‘performance
capture,’ and we can transfer that to our digital creations that are then being triggered or
hooked to various different blend shapes that we capture from the models and that gives us
a very accurate facial expression.”
Indeed; Adam and Dr. Schutz showed us the finished shots of Lily’s vagina, and were able
to zoom in so closely that we could see the texture and roots of her pubic hair—even the
angle at which each hair had been cut! Thanks to their proprietary software, each image can
ON THE SET | By Mark Kernes
CAPTURING A PHOTO-REAL STILL
T
This might be a first for AVN: We were invited to a set, and even after
having spent several hours there, we’re still not sure exactly what the
finished product is going to be—but it was hella interesting!
The “set” was the offices of CamasutraVR, where the company’s
IS NO BIG DEAL; YOU CAN SEE HOW QUICK IT PROCESSES; YOU CAN SEE IT WITHIN
founders—who go by the names “Adam” and “Dr. Schutz” to protect
A COUPLE OF HOURS.
their mainstream Hollywood identities—have set up the most elaborate
motion-capture apparatus we’ve ever heard of, and which may be unique
in the entire world: Essentially a dome made up of dozens of plastic
“beams,” 132 high-res digital cameras, flash units and computers—and
HOWEVER, ADDING MOTION IS WHERE IT BECOMES
this day, in the center of it all was porn star Lily Lane.
TRICKY.
When we arrived, Lily was sitting on a small ottoman in the center of
the dome, naked, with Adam instructing her to move her right hand into
—ADAM, CAMASUTRAVR
three positions over her vagina, in a sort-of simulation of masturbation,
while the banks of cameras captured her poses close-up from every
direction, which data were then fed to a central computer terminal for
manipulation by the company’s proprietary software.
The question was, though, what were they going to do with all this
data?
“We’ve been both working in the field of visual effects and artificial
intelligence, and we came together and started talking about what we
could do that would be truly innovative for the adult business,” Adam
stated, referring to himself and Dr. Schutz. “We were going to try to
create humans and make photo-realistic people, avatars, and we figured
that the adult business was actually a very good learning platform
because in entertainment and advertising and visual effects, you don’t
really work with the naked body so much, so that was an important
enough part of it. Also, we wanted to do something that wasn’t really
out there already, so our goal was to create photo-real virtual humans
that are eventually smart and that you can interact with, that live in
their own virtual space that you can do certain things with—whatever
you desire, really. And we’re calling these creatures ‘avatars’ and we’ve
been fortunate enough to be able to work with some very good girls to
actually shape the avatars and try to create a digital persona based on
their likeness and their voice and their movements. We’re trying to get it
as real as possible, basically.”
Their objective is to get past the phenomenon known in VR circles as
the “uncanny valley”: the situation where a computer-generated figure,
be broken down into myriad tiny triangles, each of which can be manipulated to make the
zoomed-out image more realistic.
“With the high-quality textures that we have—we’re mastering at probably at 8K
resolution per image, maybe 16 even—you can put your nose right into it and you will not
see any pixelation or any kind of stretching or any kind of weird stuff; even the timing of
each movement will seem real.”
And what did Lily think of all this?
“Ohmigod, I love it so much!” she gushed. “It’s very time-consuming, it’s very long, and
there’s lots of periods of just sitting in the same spot, but it looks so awesome! It’s really
neat. I would love to do this again. This is my second day. The first day, I was here—I don’t
know—about eight or nine hours, and then today, it’ll probably be a total of about four
hours. Everything is super-cool. I love it so far; it’s been really fun.”
Besides Lily and Anikka, the pair have shot Jynx Maze, Chrissy Lynn and Honey
Gold—”We’re going to try to launch with ten girls, all slightly different so we can cater to
everybody’s interests.”—but their very first was Casey Calvert, who to this day hasn’t a clue
just what the pair are planning.
“I was there like forever! It was a 14-hour day,” Casey noted, adding that they paid
her pretty well for her time, and even let her go in time to catch her 7 a.m. flight. “The
motion-capture thing had sensors on each one of my knuckles, so it could really track finger
movements during things like masturbation. The one thing I noted that it wasn’t really
tracking was like my boobs and my ass, because it wasn’t designed for a sex thing, so I think
they have some more work to do to figure out what kind of software they need to use to
be able to do the realistic boob motion and the realistic butt motion that they are talking
about.”
although almost perfectly resembling an actual human being, nonetheless
for some reason can be identified by the viewer as “not real,” thereby
screwing up (or at least diminishing) the illusion.
And when will the public see a commercial application of CamasutraVR’s work? At
this point, that’s anybody’s guess—but Adam said he expects that they’ll have a working
prototype by next winter—so of course we invited them to demo it at AEE 2018!
38 | AVN.com | 8.17