Google's VLOGGER AI Can Create Realistic Video Avatars From A Single Image: Here's What You Need To Know

Alphabet Inc. GOOG GOOGL-owned Google AI team’s latest project that can generate high-resolution video avatars from a single image is all the rage on social media nowadays. Here’s everything you need to know about this development in the AI arena.

What Happened: Earlier this month, Google’s Enric Corona and his team introduced VLOGGER, a tool that can produce high-quality video avatars from a single image. These avatars can be animated to mimic a person’s speech, hand and body movement, blinking, and facial expressions, creating a highly realistic representation.

Google presents VLOGGER

Multimodal Diffusion for Embodied Avatar Synthesis

We propose VLOGGER, a method for audio-driven human video generation from a single input image of a person, which builds on the success of recent generative diffusion models. Our method consists of pic.twitter.com/kxl83jPcLh

— AK (@_akhaliq) March 14, 2024

See Also: Elon Musk Reacts To Jeff Bezos Saying ‘There’s No Way You Could Have Tesla And SpaceX Without’ Him: ‘Must Be A Very Capable Leader’

How Does It Work: VLOGGER employs a two-stage pipeline to produce lifelike talking videos. The first stage derives body motion commands from audio input, encompassing gaze, facial expressions, and posture. These commands are used to generate frames through image-to-image translation in the second stage, with consideration of a reference image for identity conditioning.

Image to Video Generation:

Here are more examples of talking face generation using just a single input image and driving audio. pic.twitter.com/7bZUkIxhVi

— Roni Rahman (@heyronir) March 19, 2024

Subscribe to the Benzinga Tech Trends newsletter to get all the latest tech developments delivered to your inbox.

What Are Its Applications? According to Google researchers, this model’s primary application lies in video translation. For example, VLOGGER can process an existing video in a specific language, adjusting the lip and facial regions to synchronize with new audio inputs.

Video Translation:

One of the primary applications of this model is in video translation.

For instance, VLOGGER can take an existing video in one language and adjust the lip and facial movements to match new audio, such as Spanish. pic.twitter.com/6vjj2JKjdh

— Roni Rahman (@heyronir) March 19, 2024

Other potential applications include creating animated avatars suitable for virtual assistants, chatbots, or virtual characters exhibiting realistic appearances and movements within gaming environments.

When Will It Be Available To Masses: At this point, VLOGGER exists solely as a research project with a few entertaining demo videos. It is not available to try. However, the demo videos have already given people plenty of ideas that can be implemented if they get turned into a product.

Check out more of Benzinga's Future Of Consumer Tech by following this link.

Read Next: Apple Slams ‘Dangerous’ DOJ Lawsuit, Tim Cook’s iPhone Suggestion Returns To Haunt And Potential Google Partnership: This Week In Appleverse

Disclaimer: This content was partially produced with the help of Benzinga Neuro and was reviewed and published by Benzinga editors.