how long till you can skin yourself?

[Cartoon Corpse]

how long till there's an app that will allow you to say take a couple (few) digital photgraphs of yourself, and it will generate (various formats) a skin of yourself to use in games?

how about an app that will supply a range of voices that can synthetically generate text to speech for custom voice overs (without paying actors)...i read during the voice talent 'strike' a year or so ago, that was 2-3 years off.

any chance these apps (should they exist) would become a consumer item?

 

[Npl]

how long till you can skin yourself?

No idea, but why skin yourself unless you have a precious fur?

 

[Cartoon Corpse]

catchy title wasn't it?

 

[drspangle]

There was some technology about 5 or 6 years ago that claimed to do just that. I think it allowed you to make Q3 skins, at least.

 

[CI]

Somehow Matrox's "headcasting engine" comes to mind but it's pretty much limited.

 

[stepz]

Don't know of any software that works on regular digicam images. A couple of photos would be to few anyway, to get reasonable quality current algorithms need tens of images anyway. If additional hardware is an option, then A4 Vision has a pretty nifty solution. I saw their solution in action on a biometrics conference but the output format should be quite usable for gaming even without special tuning. It takes a couple dozen infrared images with a infrared mesh projected on your face and combines those images to get submillimeter accuracy.
They had a solution for texturing the face too, as that is required to enhance the performance of traditional 2D facerecognition systems on odd angles.

Edit: the enrollment station price was quoted at around $1k. But I think it could be massproduced with prices similar to webcams. The needed parts for capturing are a fixed-image IR projector and a low res IR camera. Neither of them are anywhere near expensive components.

 

[mjtdevries]

You mean something like the face room in Poser?

http://www.e-frontier.com/go/poser6/figuredesign
Look at the bottom of the page at "photo-based facial mapping"
It's not easy to see from those shots but I didn't find better screenshots.

The idea is that you take two photo's. One from the front, and one from the side.
You load the picture and align a template with the picture: edges of the face, eyes, mouth etc. It then creates a texture.

There is a free trial available for download if you are interested to see how well it works.
But the main problem is not really the texture, but that you first have to create a well crafted polygon head to fit the texture. And since you usually don't have that, the resulting head often doesn't match the real thing all that well