One area of active development is your face! Oh I suppose I should be more specific and refer to it as facial capture or putting
your face into the computer, but you get the idea. There are several new technologies and beta type products out there for you to
put your face into a game, a chat environment and so on.
Two of the "biggies" are from a company called face2face and Eyematic. Face2face is a startup, spinoff from Lucent started by
Eric Petajan. Dr. Eric has been doing facial analysis for many years even completing his dissertation on the topic. More interestingly face2face
produces animations (of your face) that are compatable with MPEG-4. MPEG-4 is the next major version of MPEG, the standard that brought
you home movies on DVD, and it covers 3D with a particularly strong section on facial animation. The point of
all this being that facial animations produced using face2face sofware is "standard" and will therefore
last a long time. In addition I expect MPEG-4 to be the next major technology for 3D, not so much on the web but
3D for set-top boxes and integration with TV.
Chat environment with avatar tracking face. (courtesy Eyematic)
Facial tracking, computer generating lines superimposed showing real time tracking. (courtesy Eyematic)
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