Move Your Bubbles!

Today, fancy images are everywhere. Have you wondered what it looks like if they move naturally? In this project, I will introduce a bio-inspired tool, Neural Cellular Automata (NCA), for dynamic texture synthesis in the 2D and 3D domains. By modeling each pixel as an intelligent agent that can communicate with each other, NCA generates naturally moving videos given static target images. Apart from the emergent dynamics, NCA enjoys various test-time properties such as robustness to perturbation, motion control, and grafting. It can be used for game development, special effect creation, and creative arts. Different from current deep learning models that have hundreds of millions of parameters, NCA typically has less than 10000 parameters, rendering it easy to deploy on edge devices such as your phone!