Wednesday, 15 August 2012

Disney Planning To Clone And Shave You?



Completely taken aback by the recent news that Disney Research is working on digitally cloning and shaving our faces. Not sure if this is bad or not, but it certainly points towards not needing facial scans from actors anymore.

What is astounding is that they've taken it a step further by applying this new technique to 'audio animatronics' - Simply put, these scans will be used to automate replication of human faces for future Disney Robots. The process is complicated enough in that a subject's face is first captured under a variety of different expressions and the data is fed into a system that later uses the data to composite synthetic skin. Thereby, creating a digital version of the subject.

It's still pretty cool though! Check it out:






This brought back memories of the ever-advancing Lightstage - a cutting-edge technology headed by Paul Debevec of University of Southern California's Institute of Technology. Lightstage, having been used in many of today's visually spectacular films, replicates real-world lighting under HDRI (High Dynamic Range) conditions. Hence creating a digital map of every bit of detail on the subject's skin while capturing a barrage of expressions. ---- This is Lightstage in a paragraph although there's a lot more than meets the eye. 

If you're interested in learning more about Lightstage in all it's tech, be sure to check out FXGuide's take on Paul Debevec and ICT - here's a link http://www.fxguide.com/featured/paul-debevec-and-ict-an-fxphd-bkd/

Hope you've found this at least a bit informative. Till' next blog post!


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