Artists’ Digital Masks Move With Your Face [VIDEO]

[Waqas 48]

Maybe you haven’t always wanted to substitute your face for that of Brad Pitt or Paris Hilton, but you might soon be able to — at least digitally.

Artists Kyle McDonald and Arturo Castro have created a face-substitution program that makes it look like your face has morphed into someone else’s. Far from just pasting a static mask onto your image, the program preserves your facial and bodily movements. It looks uncanny, if not entirely real.

“It basically shows you the feed from your webcam, except it pastes a picture on top of your face in realtime, and does some smart blending to make it look more natural,” McDonald says.

Castro first came up with the idea by putting two concepts from open source code library Openframeworks together. The first was work by Kevin Atkinson that substituted one face for another on a static image. The second was a program that McDonald wrote (with the help of an open code library) to track a face’s detailed movement in real time.

When McDonald saw the first iteration of the resulting mask program, he responded with a version blending the lines between a fake and real face so they almost disappear.

Face substitution has been experimented with before, but it’s never been this creepily convincing. Right now, there’s no way for the public to use Mcdonald and Castro’s version, but eventually they hope to make it accessible through some form of exhibit.

“We’re curious to see what kind of mayhem and media skepticism results from having this technique available to everyone,” McDonald says.

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