Digital Face Scanning Breakthrough

Researchers of the Sheffield HallamUniversity in the UK have created a technology that allows a person to easily and quickly create a fully 3D scan of his/her face.

digital representation of a real life face

This technology is truly amazing, since it constructs a 3D face from one single snapshot directly facing the face to be digitized in 40 ms.

Be sure to check out the videoclips at the source. They are well worth your time.

A few screenshots of one of the video's (click to enlarge):



We are spending more and more of our time in virtual environments (VE). Everytime you converse with someone over your phone or over the Internet, you are spending your time in VE. Everytime you are playing a videogame that really draws you in, you are effectively living your adventure in VE.

As you can read in The Future Of Virtual Environments, VE's will become more and more compelling in the near future. As a direct result of that, we will be spending more and more of our time in VE. Eventually, we will be living the bigger portion of our lives there.

Naturally, we'll want digital representations (that we will likely end up enhancing) of ourselves in such a future. This facescanning technology is just the technology we need in order to do that.


Sidenotes:

• For everyone who is having problems imagining how computer graphics might get to the point where they're indistinguishable from real life, it is interesting to check out a movie clip of the upcoming videogame Crysis. Especially the clip on the right, Tech Demo, is well worth your time.
• This article (scroll down to Cell Phones, Reality Gaming and Industrial Gaming) also describes how our lives are gradually moving into VE.
• A recent post of mine, The Future Of Videogames, reported on very realistic physics in upcoming games. Naturally, that is also essential if you're out to create compelling VE's.
• Did you know people are already living big portions of their lives inVE? They're turning real life cash into virtual money. The virtual money is then used to buy virtual land. The virtual land is rented out to interested parties, for which virtual money is received. The virtual money can then be converted back to real life cash. As an example, see Second Life.