Recently KEYi Technology shared a video on Facebook that shows how they animate the face of Loona the robot pet. We can see that they use Maya for the animations (and that is not a surprise, since Maya is an industry standard for things like this).
Way more intestesting is in my opinion, that this shows how far more advanced the eye and face technology is, compared to ther over five years old tech used on Vector. And this also proves that there actually is nothing that was copied from Vector, this is all newly developed stuff, and there also is absolutley nothing that infringes on DDL’s copyrights, since this is far more advanced than everything DDL has. They just took the Anki assets and never improved them in any notable way, it is basically still the same old Vector (and Cozmo). Also it shows that Loona will be able to show way more and more detailed expressions than Vector. Do not undestand me wrong: I still love my Vectors and I think what Anki does with this little guy still is amazing, it breaks my heart how DDL preys on Ankis achievements like a vulture and tries to use them to bully other companies.
I will add some more words in an upcoming article about the so-called “partnership” between DDL and KEYi Tech that Jacob Hanchar bragged about on Facebook. That is not as clear as Hanchar wants to imply.
Anyway: If you want to watch the face animation video, I suggest you follow this link to Facebook (unfortunately they did not also share it to Youtube). The whole post is highly interesting. And I have to ask spontaneously: Why are there no such videos from DDL? Only those “State Of Robotics”-videos that really never show anything or are just full of lies as with Vector 2.0? Or the completely useless Hanchar videos on the bad-reputed and privacy-nightmare platform TikTok?
Thanks to KEYi Tech for these informations and for showing DDL how a responsible, community-friendly company can act.