Editorial: Creating Lifelike Digital Humans

Abstract

Digital humans populate digital worlds becoming more and more important in our daily life. Used for 2 decades in the entertainment industry for video games and movies, they are now as ubiquitous as virtual 3 environments, digital twins or so-called metaverses are. Yet, creating lifelike digital humans is still an active 4 research topic. Many scientific challenges are to be tackled in to overcome the uncanny valley. Human 5 perception is extremely precise when it comes to detecting flaws in digital humans, due to modeling, 6 rendering, or animation. That is why this field of study is deeply multidisciplinary, and the goal of this The first stage of shape and appearance modeling has been largely studied and multiple techniques exist 9 today to reconstruct digital humans. They all have their advantages and drawbacks that would depend 10 on the target application. Selecting technology is however not straightforward. This lack of comparison 11 led Bartl et al. (2021) to conduct a study evaluating output results from a high-end and a low-cost 3D 12 reconstruction setup. They also showed the relationship between model quality and user perception. In this way, this compilation of articles highlights the typical challenges of this exciting research area.We believe that the synergy created by these different works contributes to the creation of lifelike digital 32 humans.33We are grateful to all authors, journal editors, and peer reviewers who contributed to this Research Topic.