FaceTracker is what you call a “real time generic non-rigid face alignment system,” in other words, it tracks your face and is really cool. Naturally, people have been adapting it to do all sorts of weird, face-related things like wearing other people’s faces in a kind-of-creepy but non-leatherface sort of way. Daito Manabe and Zachary Liberman, two endeavoring fellows, have taken to playing with the software themselves. They’re into projecting something this is definitely not a face, onto an actual face.
By modifying the FaceTracker software by adding a little code and hooking it up to everybody’s favorite peice of trendy, optical hardware, a Kinect, they came up with Face Projection. I’ll forgive you if you can’t keep the names straight. Face Projection uses the FaceTracker base to project a variety of dynamic images onto the user’s face, like neon-looking lights and bouncing balls. Basically a lot of things that react to eye movement.
Granted, this is all fun and games and probably doesn’t have any application beyond “Hey, look at that,” but that’s art, right? I also like how a lot of the dynamically projected balls seem to bounce off eyebrows and mustaches. I think there is an idea for a really, really weird facial-hair game somewhere in there, but I can’t quite figure out what it is. Somebody get Peter Molydeux on the case.
(Design Boom via Bit Rebels)
- The same base technology applied to wear other people’s faces
- A list of 50 things that look like faces
- And this Kinect-powered Breakout game uses a whole building as a screen
