Avirup Dey

3d vision / head avatars
CS PhD @UniofBath

[Michael Black @Michael_J_Black]

Tomorrow, I start a new full-time position as VP Digital Human Research at Epic Games. (And no, this isn’t an April Fools’ joke.)

Today, I’m taking early retirement from Max Planck and will become an Emeritus Director.

As an Emeritus Director, I will continue to supervise my remaining students, oversee ongoing projects, and wind down my department over the next couple of years, which is a normal process when a director retires.

Being a Max Planck director is the best academic job in the world and it has been my great honor to co-found and help build the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems. I love the institute deeply.

But my statutory retirement age was looming and I’m not done yet. I’ve been working on capturing and modeling human movement for 30 years and it has gone from a fringe topic to something that works robustly and has immense potential.

With AI today, scale matters, and achieving that scale increasingly requires industry. In particular, digital humans are moving from research prototypes to foundational technology across industries. At this point in my career, I want to get this technology into the hands of millions of users, while pushing the frontier of digital humans.

I know that this is a challenging time for the games industry. Such times are precisely when people get creative, the industry is open to change, and real innovation can take root.

Epic Games is the ideal place for this. The talent is deep, there is a compelling vision for how games will evolve, and the commitment is clear. I’m excited to join them and the rest of the Meshcapade team.

There is no good way to express on social media the depth of my gratitude to the Max Planck Society, my co-directors, students, post docs, and staff. It has been an amazing 15-year journey because of you. Thank you.

[Gabriele Berton @gabriberton]

Quite literally all of 3D vision

This includes VGGT, Dust3r and friends which are trained on COLMAP-generated data

Also gaussian splatting and NERFs in most cases use COLMAP-generated poses

[Avirup Dey @avideypi]

@jack_r_saunders did you face track a demon? haha

[Matthias Niessner @MattNiessner]

Good news: Soham Parekh, a PhD student in our group, will finally have the bandwidth to focus on his academic career!

We just awarded him another scholarship that allows him to work remote.

[Avirup Dey @avideypi]

@PeterSweden7 All colonial empires in history were capitalists. what's your point? plundered the entire world just to fund pointless wars in their homelands 🤡

[Avirup Dey @avideypi]

doing god's work 🙏

[Jack Saunders @jack_r_saunders]

🤖 🗞️ Free AI Generated Digital Humans Newsletter -> https://t.co/sIRtmceDbJ

Like everyone else, I've been struggling to keep up with the sheer volume of papers and news in the Digital Human space. Over the past few weeks, I've developed an agentic (ish) AI pipeline to find and summarise the latest daily papers and relevant news articles and deliver them as a newsletter to my inbox.

Now I want to share this with anyone interested. It will be a daily newsletter with up to three relevant papers (each with a summary) and up to three news items. I've been finding it very useful as an entry point (before doing my own further research). If you think this could be valuable, please sign up for free!

I'll still keep posting, and I will not just copy the LLM summaries.

Just a disclaimer, this is done by LLMs, so information may be inaccurate, and the news articles may seem irrelevant/promotional.

[Avirup Dey @avideypi]

@FightWithMemes Modern Family duh. Stop watching andrew tate reels

[Avirup Dey @avideypi]

@Nojo48052439 @DarrigoMelanie awww...time to start over from A for apple

[Avirup Dey @avideypi]

@aritra_marik buy one to find out how 'her' bathwater soaps are made

[Avirup Dey @avideypi]

@aritra_marik bengalis don't talk abt partition...bro what????

[Avirup Dey @avideypi]

@dimtzionas Thank you so much for the talk, Dimitris! It was a pleasure having you.

[Nate Gillman @ CVPR @GillmanLab]

Ever wish you could turn your video generator into a controllable physics simulator?

We're thrilled to introduce Force Prompting! Animate any image with physical forces and get fine-grained control, without needing any physics simulator or 3D assets at inference. 🧵(1/n)

[Avirup Dey @avideypi]

@jxmnop digital human researchers looking at veo 3 haha

[Avirup Dey @avideypi]

@gypsy_nilima @MattooShashank the conflict started and ended in medieval ages. i guess there is no historical memory of that rivalry.

[Avirup Dey @avideypi]

@k6_c7 @luke_leisher_ half-life of normal uranium is 700 mill years. didn't stop us from making a-bombs.

[Avirup Dey @avideypi]

@dstock_insights I agree with your conclusion but not your sentiment. Setting up industries of strategic importance near Pak/Ban border needlessly risky. However, there is a migration problem in the south so setting up some industries in the north can solve some of that.

[Avirup Dey @avideypi]

@IndianGems_ Air with high AQI is the best reward

[Avirup Dey @avideypi]

@kaushikcbasu Is this satire?

[Avirup Dey @avideypi]

@aritra_marik Nothing speaks of beauty more than crumbling infra :3

[Avirup Dey @avideypi]

@Amockx2022 Wants US FDI but Russian energy. Wants ties with theocracies and democracies. Wants BRICS but is opposed to China. Not a good recipe to get loyalty.