The latest AI breakthrough comes from Microsoft and gives us a way to bring back the dead. Well, sort of. Thanks to VASA-1 it’s now possible to bring a simple image to life and provide it with synced up audio. Making it possible to bring paintings to life or bring back deceased actors.
@bindureddy on X sums it up best:
“Microsoft Research announced VASA-1. It takes a single portrait photo and speech audio and produces a hyper-realistic talking face video with precise lip-audio sync, lifelike facial behavior, and naturalistic head movements generated in real-time. This is amazing, given that the AI-generated video looks very real! Of course, these examples will likely be cherry-picked, but this is still amazing. My favorite use-case for this tech is to revive old actors like Cary Grant in new movies with this tech :).”
Microsoft’s thinking meanwhile is that it will help to bring virtual avatars to life enabling them to realistically mirror normal human behavior.
As they put it on their blog:
“We introduce VASA, a framework for generating lifelike talking faces of virtual characters with appealing visual affective skills (VAS), given a single static image and a speech audio clip. Our premiere model, VASA-1, is capable of not only producing lip movements that are exquisitely synchronized with the audio, but also capturing a large spectrum of facial nuances and natural head motions that contribute to the perception of authenticity and liveliness. The core innovations include a holistic facial dynamics and head movement generation model that works in a face latent space, and the development of such an expressive and disentangled face latent space using videos. Through extensive experiments including evaluation on a set of new metrics, we show that our method significantly outperforms previous methods along various dimensions comprehensively. Our method not only delivers high video quality with realistic facial and head dynamics but also supports the online generation of 512×512 videos at up to 40 FPS with negligible starting latency. It paves the way for real-time engagements with lifelike avatars that emulate human conversational behaviors.”
It also paves the way for deepfakes but that might be worth it for creating realistic avatars, bringing famous paintings to life and resurrecting the dead.
Is VASA-1 the Greatest Idea Ever?
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