Microsoft Research is stealing faces - and maybe more besides. Unabashedly describing his operation as Microsoft's Star Trek division, unabashed Trekkie Rick Rashid last week described how the group had lifted 300 faces at the recent CHI (Computer Human Interface) conference, and showed what could be done with them.
MSR tracks a camera around your face, then uses this as the basic data to produce a realistic animation of your head. Or in the case of the demo, Rick's head. Put the animation up on screen and you can make it smile, frown and... er, well that seemed to be about it for the moment. And it does seem to have black hollows instead of eyeballs, but that just kind of adds to the bodysnatchers flavour of things.
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