Strategic collaboration combines JALI’s procedural multilingual facial animation system with Goodbye Kansas’ “Project Freya” face rigging, giving leading game developers total platform freedom, elite cinematic quality, and lightweight performance on console, PC, and beyond.
TORONTO & STOCKHOLM — JALI Research Inc. (JALI) and Goodbye Kansas (GBK) today announced a strategic partnership to solve one of the most persistent bottlenecks in interactive entertainment: building hyper-realistic, multilingual digital humans without being locked into proprietary game engines or bloated pipelines.
By integrating JALI’s industry-leading procedural facial animation with GBK’s proprietary Project Freya facial rigging infrastructure, the two companies are creating an open, modular framework. The framework is purpose-built to enable a premium face solution for high end games as well as indie teams, where character fidelity is important. The combined solution delivers cinematic facial performance and flawless multilingual lip sync while maintaining a lightweight memory footprint. Crucially, the tools offer complete engine independence, giving developers full control over their characters across any engine, including proprietary studio engines.
While engineered to meet the extreme performance and scale demands of AAA game studios, the suite’s lightweight, thread-safe architecture will naturally extend to cross-platform deployments, including real-time experiential entertainment, location-based attractions, thin clients, and AI-driven interactive characters.
"Experienced game developers shouldn't have to compromise between cinematic fidelity and pipeline flexibility," said Erik Johansson, Head of Technology at Goodbye Kansas. "By integrating Project Freya’s advanced rigging framework with JALI’s procedural lip-sync engine, we've created a synergy that solves this problem. We are giving studio teams a scalable, modular pipeline capable of handling massive multilingual scripts across PC, console, or other targets, all without tying them to a single engine or vendor."
"We believe the most important innovations happen when talented teams share knowledge and work together to solve meaningful creative challenges," said Sarah Watling, Co-Founder and CEO of JALI Research. "Our partnership with Goodbye Kansas reflects a shared commitment to helping studios and creators achieve more value from their investments in characters, pipelines, and storytelling. By combining our strengths, we see an opportunity to create solutions that are more powerful, more flexible, and ultimately more valuable for the people building the next generation of digital experiences."
For additional information, please contact:
Carsten Myhill, CEO, Goodbye Kansas Group
E-mail: carsten.myhill@goodbyekansas.com
Direct: +46 8-556 990 00
Sarah Watling, CEO, JALI Research Inc
E-mail: sarah@jaliresearch.com
Phone: + 1 647 458 8850
About Goodbye Kansas Group
Goodbye Kansas creates award-winning visual effects, digital animation, and performance capture for film, TV, and video games. Blending world-class artistry with cutting-edge technology, the studio provides storytellers with end-to-end production capabilities, from concept art and digital humans to full cinematic execution. Through internal R&D initiatives like Project Freya, Goodbye Kansas continues to push the boundaries of real-time digital character performance, developing advanced facial rigging infrastructure designed to give creators unprecedented freedom, quality, and scale across interactive entertainment. Goodbye Kansas is part of Goodbye Kansas Group AB. Goodbye Kansas Group is headquartered in Stockholm and is listed on Nasdaq First North Growth Market with Bergs Securities as Certified Adviser.
www.goodbyekansasgroup.com
About JALI Research
JALI’s procedural animation system employs intelligent automation and is designed with a deep understanding of the principles of rigging and animation craft. With tools to automate and direct the animation of best-in-class automated lip sync, expressive multilingual facial animation, and high-performance rigging and pipeline solutions, JALI empowers animators to deliver cinematic-quality character animation with ease - on time, on budget and on model, and high fidelity in game character animation at unprecedented scale. For more information: https://jaliresearch.com/