Chapter 56: About the creation of Mini Jina

Darkness heavily settled over Jina’s narrow studio apartment in the early morning.

The only thing illuminating the place, littered with empty energy drink cans, was the pale light of the monitor.

Tangled hair, hollow eyes, a crumpled T-shirt that looked like she hadn’t changed in days… anyone could see she was worn out from working all night, but Jina’s eyes shone brightly.

Quite a bit of time had passed since she delivered the 4 custom avatars to Daon.

From then until now.

The blue flame engraved in Jina’s eyes had not been extinguished and continued to burn.

“SD… realistic… Conan… Shinichi…”

Jina murmured to herself, alternately looking at the complexly intertwined formulas and the screen where graphs moved in real time. When the AI model, which had completed learning and verification, spat out a performance score, Jina’s fingers danced accordingly.

Each time her fingers tapped the keyboard, a part of the formula was erased and filled in again and again.

“Certainly, the Soda model is getting high scores in the evaluation method that puts cuteness as the core indicator, but…”

The movements are a mess that makes you sigh involuntarily.

It’s awkward and unnatural, like a marionette doll with broken joints.

This is because the center of gravity is jumping wildly on its own.

“The existing AI model has only learned adult movements. It was natural that it couldn’t create movements that fit a child’s body.”

Jina rubbed her stiff eyes and stared at the monitor again.

One step further.

If she could just grab a clue,

She felt like the problem would be solved.

“Natural movement… movement in the virtual world… vision… optical illusion… trickery…”

Jina put the AI model to learning again and pushed the keyboard back.

Several empty cans fell to the floor.

Jina didn’t care about the loud noise and opened her notebook.

She clicked the sharp and pulled out the lead, then scribbled formulas in the empty space in the corner of the notebook.

In the middle of the notebook, which was densely filled as if she had written all over it.

Before starting this work in earnest, a large phrase caught her eye.

[How to breathe life into an arbitrary avatar.]

Jina moistened her dry lips and took a deep breath again.

The body may be smaller, but the brain remains the same.

This is one of the famous lines from a famous detective comic that gets caught up in incidents wherever he goes.

The work Jina was performing was ultimately ‘reducing a high school detective to a little detective’.

“In a big way, it’s no different from applying a ‘filter’ in a photo editing program.”

Jina flashed her eyes like a detective who solved a case that was in a maze.

The key was ‘non-linear transformation’.

Jina chewed on this word and murmured in a languid voice.

“Just like applying a filter to an original photo… apply a special filter to realistic avatars, that is, a formula that transforms them into SD styles.”

If she can find that formula.

She can immediately transform existing AI models or movement data by applying the same formula.

Of course, finding that formula is a very difficult task.

After staining the notebook with formulas, Jina.

She pulled the keyboard forward again and entered new code.

After setting up the formula, erasing the keyboard, staring blankly at the monitor, taking a sigh, erasing it, and setting up the formula again and again.

Jina somehow succeeded in shrinking the realistic template avatar, JINA, to fit the Soda model.

“Let’s name this model… MINA.”

Mini Jina.

Short for Mina.

“Looking at it like this, I feel something strange…”

She swallowed the subtle feeling that it was like seeing a younger sister with a big age difference.

For a very short time, she also felt like a daughter, but… this was a dizzying imagination in many ways, so she immediately buried it in the depths of her mind.

That’s how similar she looks to Jina.

From the beginning, the Jina model, which became the base of the Mina model, is a model that has been learned based on Jina’s body data information. It’s strange if they don’t look alike.

“If I had released Mina for free instead of Soda…”

The broadcasting platform might have been plastered with Jina’s adolescence (?).

Jina was self-deprecating, but she was designing a complex algorithm.

Now she had to perform the role of converting the movement data registered in Jina to fit Mina.

First, Jina poured all the motion data of her realistic avatars into Mina.

Walking, running, jumping, dancing… she even reprocessed and put in the video she had filmed while playing rhythm games in the arcade.

If you put the frames together, it was a vast amount of data amounting to hundreds of hours.

“Now compress these data to fit the SD style…”

Jina applied the non-linear transformation formula she had extracted after a long time to the data.

Like a poison that turned a high school student into an elementary school student, the bone structure of the realistic avatar was transformed into the bone structure of the SD style.

At first glance, it seemed to have been properly applied.

As always, problems are bound to erupt in unexpected places.

“…What is this?”

When she moves her shoulders or knees, her arms and legs stretch out like rubber humans.

Also, there was a problem that the joints were bent or the body was twisted when she took certain actions.

The only encouraging thing is.

It’s cute enough and natural enough.

Just one step.

A whole step.

In a situation where she kept spinning in place, she finally succeeded in moving forward.

Jina analyzed the problem.

It was not enough to simply ‘copy’ the movements of a realistic avatar to an SD character.

“SD characters have big heads and short limbs, so…”

The center of gravity is also different, and the range of joint movement is also narrow.

“And above all… there are many cases where exaggerated movements are used to emphasize ‘cuteness’.”

Now is the time to add unique movement data for the SD style that is not available in realistic avatars.

When she first learned Soda, she indiscriminately put in data as it came, without consistency.

That’s why the result was neither one nor the other.

Now she ‘understood’ the avatar.

She had a direction for how to process the animation.

She saw the pattern of the data to be learned.

Jina started searching YouTube.

“When you swing your arms, the torso also shakes, and the legs move all at once with the thighs and calves…”

She checked the videos as they came, and selected the data according to firm standards.

She didn’t care about the genre, from animation featuring SD characters to game videos and even children’s cartoons.

“Instead of removing the joint on the knee side, add a bouncing movement like a rubber ball so that it doesn’t look awkward…”

Jina yawned and retrained the Mina model.

After spending several more nights like that.

After experiencing dozens of trials and errors and shotgunning the keyboard.

Mina finally began to show the movements Jina wanted.

It’s a little more mature than the existing SD characters.

If Soda is an elementary school student, Mina is about a middle school student.

The movement was no longer awkward.

It was natural like a living creature.

Most of all… it moved incredibly cutely.

When she shook her arms, her torso also shook, and when she jumped lightly, she bounced.

When she winked, her eyes sparkled, and when she opened her mouth wide, her cute tongue popped out.

“Yes, this is it… I wanted this…”

Instead of cheering, Jina slid off her chair with a languid sigh.

It felt like the fatigue of working all night was coming all at once.

But, Jina could not be satisfied yet.

Mina was not perfect yet.

There was still some subtle unnaturalness in some movements.

The formulas that Jina had newly created separate from learning were not working properly yet.

Jina barely crawled back into the chair and began to modify the Mina model.

Like a watchmaker fitting each gear, a delicate and careful work continued.

And finally.

“…Did I beat it?”

Jina took a deep breath and looked at the completed avatar.

“It’s a lot later than I thought… but Soyul-nim will understand this much…”

Jina murmured to herself and began to close the windows that were open on the monitor one by one.

While she was clicking the mouse, a Word file written in English caught Jina’s eye.

[Using Similarity-Based Optimization, AI Model and Behavior Data…]

Jina stared blankly at the screen.

The document contained Jina’s research process as it was, from the neatly trimmed formulas to the structure of the AI model and the movements of the avatar.

“I was just going to leave a note or something…”

Before she knew it, she was writing a paper in between.

Even this, if she just trims a few sentences, she can submit it as it is.

“The habits of my graduate school days are still there.”

Jina let out a self-deprecating laugh.

She didn’t plan to work this hard.

When she came to her senses, she was sending a sincere punch again.

“Looking at it like this, it feels like a waste.”

Come to think of it, Hyoin said that the deadline for the academic conference was not long ago?

She felt like it would be okay to fix it a little and submit it roughly.

Before that… let’s take a nap and wake up.

Jina fell asleep on her desk as it was.

…Exactly 12 hours passed since then.

“Kkueoeolge…”

Jina woke up, holding her back, and headed quietly to the blanket.

30s, the age when her whole body starts to ache.