3D faces from mug-shots

Submitted by itruelove on Wed, 08/20/2008 - 12:42.






I've found a great tool for generating 3D heads from a single mug-shot. (Click on the 3D face and then move the slider). The one above was created from a standard Photo Booth snap from the built in webcam on my MacBook. The processing is all done via a web interface, probably server side. It's a bit useless at the moment, as all you get is the thing above, but there are plans to allow export of the meshes and textures. I think some of the other augmentationist commercial virtual worlds might already be using something like this (Twinity?). It would make a lot of sense to see something that actually looks like the student you are dealing with in an augmentationist environment, rather than the spooky doll avatars that exist currently. It might be a good intermediate stage until the technology speeds up enough to allow the sort of live 3D video that I mentioned in my last post.