“For its long-running Madden NFL series, EA developers travel the country to make three-dimensional scans of professional players. But that wasn’t financially or logistically feasible for ‘EA Sports College Football 25.’

There are about six times as many players in the National Collegiate Athletic Association’s top-tier Football Bowl Subdivision as there are in the National Football League. In addition, colleges don’t set their rosters until the late spring and they often change significantly, as some players go pro and others matriculate.

To release the college-football game this month, EA relied on artificial-intelligence technology it began developing about four years ago…

EA collected photos of the athletes’ heads from their schools and then used its AI to create their videogame doppelgängers in seconds. The technology isn’t generative AI that creates new images such as OpenAI’s Dall-E, but rather a kind that takes data from photos and creates full 3-D avatars.”

From Wall Street Journal.