morpheme

OXFORD and DUBLIN - Sept. 30, 2008

NaturalMotion, the animation technology company behind the revolutionary euphoria engine, today announced that Trinity College Dublin has selected morpheme to power character animation within its Metropolis research project. Metropolis, under development by the university’s Graphics, Vision and Visualization Group (GV2), part of the School of Computer Science and Statistics, is a realistic, computer-generated ‘Virtual Dublin,’ with functioning, large-scale simulated crowds.

morpheme is robust animation middleware designed to give developers and animators unprecedented creative control over the look of their final in-game animation by allowing them to author and preview blends, blend trees and transition graphs in real time. Since its launch in 2007, morpheme has seen rapid adoption in the games industry, including customers such as Bioware, Eidos and Disney.

“morpheme is an excellent animation engine with great tools support. In Metropolis we’re aiming for very high fidelity character movement, for large numbers of characters, employing blending of motion captured data and real-time inverse kinematics. The morpheme animation editor tool allows us to quickly sequence motions at a high level and seamlessly deploy these in our engine run-time which means we can focus on the research problems of behavior simulation and motion planning,” said Dr. Steven Collins of the GV2 Research Group in Trinity College Dublin.

“The fact that morpheme is being used in an academic pursuit is very fulfilling for NaturalMotion, because the research behind our technology originated in academia,” said Andy Payne, VP NaturalMotion. “The researchers who will have a chance to use morpheme at Trinity College will be experiencing the same tools professional developers are using in AAA game titles.”

About NaturalMotion

NaturalMotion Ltd. is the first company to create 3D character animation software based on Dynamic Motion Synthesis (DMS), a technology that utilizes Adaptive Behaviors and artificial intelligence to simulate the human-nervous system. Based on research conducted at Oxford University on the control of body movements, NaturalMotion’s euphoria synthesizes 3D character animation in real time on PLAYSTATION®3, Xbox 360® and PC. Having debuted in Rockstar Games’ record-breaking Grand Theft Auto IV, euphoria is also featured in LucasArts’ Star Wars: The Force Unleashed.

NaturalMotion’s off-line DMS product endorphin creates animation an order of magnitude faster than traditional techniques, and is widely used in the film and game industries, with customers such as Sony, Giant Killer Robots, The Mill, Capcom, Namco and Konami.

NaturalMotion’s third product, morpheme, is the industry’s first graphically authorable animation engine designed to give animators full control over the look of their animations in-game. Announced morpheme customers include Ninja Theory, IO Interactive, Bioware and Red 5.

For further information please visit NaturalMotion’s website www.naturalmotion.com, or join the 130,000 endorphin LE users at community.naturalmotion.com.

©euphoria, endorphin and morpheme are registered trademarks of NaturalMotion Ltd.

Xbox, Xbox 360, and Xbox Live are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries. "PLAYSTATION" is a registered trademark of Sony Computer Entertainment Inc.

About Trinity College Dublin

Founded in 1592 Trinity College Dublin is the oldest university in Ireland and one of the older universities of Western Europe. Trinity College Dublin is recognized internationally as Ireland’s premier university. It is ranked 53rd place in the top world universities and 13th in Europe by The Times Higher Education Supplement (THES) university league tables. Trinity offers a unique educational experience across a diverse range of disciplines. It is committed to world-class research and scholarship and has developed significant international strength in its research.

Wes Phillips, TriplePoint for NaturalMotion

(415) 955-8500

wes@triplepointpr.com

Caoimhe Ní Lochlainn, TCD Press Officer

+353-1-8962310

communications@tcd.ie