It clearly also has lots of uses that are waiting to be discovered. The company, also called FaceShift, is a spin off from École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) is of the opinion that the technology could revolutionize on-line gaming and communication in general. Finally you can export the animation to your current 3D animation software and continue to work on it. The results can be seen in realtime but you can capture the animation and improve it if needs be. Next you simply sit in front of the camera and talk, move your head and pull silly (or otherwise) expressions.

You have to train the software to personalize it to your set of facial expressions. Watch the video to see what the overall effect is: It is not just the speed of operation that is important it is the accuracy. It claims to be tracking 48 blendshape parameters (which change the shape of a small area of the face) in addition to eye gaze. The level of detail that is tracked goes well beyond what the basic depth camera can achieve. The real advance is that the algorithms use the depth and color camera to not only measure pose but also facial expression. It works on Windows, Mac and, very soon, Linux. It has been in beta for a few months and is now available as a finished version.Īll you need is a Kinect and a copy of the software. We have seen demos of the Kinect being used to animate on-screen characters, but this is the first commercial quality program. FaceShift is a new motion caputure program that uses the Kinect to map your body and facial expression to the head of an avatar - in realtime.

Considering the number of amazing demonstrations that the Kinect puts on, there aren't as many commercial apps for it as you might expect.

Faceshift with kinect