Sporting heroes and celebrities are to be the subject of a new cloning experiment in Scotland. Virtual Clones is set to revolutionise the interactive entertainment industry with its ground-breaking character creation software.

A spin-out company from the Universities of Glasgow and Edinburgh and recent winner of a SMART Award, Virtual Clones was established by Dr Colin Urquhart and Douglas Green and aims to speed up the process of creating realistic celebrity characters for the gaming and movie industry.

Based at Glasgow's Hillington Park Innovation Centre, Virtual Clones can also significantly reduce the cost of 3D character development whilst simultaneously providing a more personalised and realistic gaming experience.

The process of creating computer versions of living celebrities can take an experienced programmer up to four weeks to complete but by using Virtual Clones' technology this can now be done in minutes.

Dr Urquhart said, "We have been developing this software for years but it is only recently that we have started to see a real need in the market.

Computer graphics are becoming ever more sophisticated but the corresponding increase in effort required to create the levels of realism now being demanded is becoming unviable.

The market for 3D content creation for movies and games is forecast to grow by 25 per cent per annum and reach $1.2 billion by 2005 so the potential for our products and services is huge."

Virtual Clones utilises two novel processes: the first of which involves two separate cameras taking stereo pairs of images of the subject from various angles. This enables them to capture the subject's shape and nuances, which are then processed by the computer to create a 3D model.

The second is called mesh conformation, which allows an existing virtual character model such as a video game character to be morphed to the shape and appearance of a captured individual. This results in a lifelike replica of the living subject in the game.

One of the main advantages of the company's 3D body capture technology is that it is compact and portable meaning it can be brought to the subject who no longer need to travel to a bulky body scanner.

Dr Urquhart said, "The first problem used to be how to get stars such as Tiger Woods to come to you. With our technology we can go to him."

Football games such as FIFA 2003 are continually striving to improve graphics year on year. Current manually intensive character modelling techniques make it unfeasible to realistically model large numbers of real-life players.

Dr Urquhart added, "Our 3D capture method simply uses a stereo pair of off-the-shelf professional digital stills cameras. It can be easily transported and set-up at a team's training ground making it entirely possible to capture all the images required to model a whole team in a single day."

The company's core 3D modelling technology is also applicable to other markets such as medicine, health and fitness and apparel.

Media Relations Office (media@gla.ac.uk)

For further information please contact: Dr Colin Urquhart, Judith Hodgson Virtual Clones Press Office 0141 585 6480 / 07753 610 937 0141 330 3535 / 3683 Photography is available from Press Office

First published: 22 July 2003