The Sims 4 could use AI to automatically turn photographs into characters
A patent filed by EA back in April 2020 (and subsequently approved in October 2021) reveals AI technology that could be used in The Sims 4 game to turn pictures of people into in-game characters with just two clicks.
As reported by Sims Community, the patent itself discusses the AI technology, explaining that it will allow players to upload photographs of themselves or characters, which can then be converted into an accurate Sim.
While the first Sims game allowed you to place an image of a face onto a character model in Sims Creator, the results often left something to be desired. This AI tech could prove to be a more effective way of actually creating your likeness within the game, though there are no examples available right now to show off its capabilities.
The tech was developed by a team of developers and led by Igor Borovikov, who previously worked on The Sims 4 as well as older titles like The Sims 3 and The Sims Medieval.
It would also seem that alongside facial features, the tech will be able to generate the full body of your characters from images, with lines within the patent stating “the method comprises: receiving an input image of a reference subject; processing the input image to generate a normalized image; identifying a set of features present in the normalized image, wherein each feature in the set of features corresponds to a portion of a head or body of the reference subject”.
Unsurprisingly, EA owns the patent outright so we’ll have to wait and see if they’re happy to share the tech with other games that include character creation. It also isn’t clear if this will be implemented in The Sims 4, which is expected to have fresh content churned out for a few years yet, or if development is far enough away for this to make its first appearance in The Sims 5.
