Digital Mouths, Synthetic Faces at MIT and Lucasfilm

jfengel writes "Two separate articles about generating faces automatically. From the Boston Globe, there is a story about MIT scientists putting words into somebody's mouth by splicing together footage. In the samples, I couldn't tell the difference between the synthetic footage and the same person really saying the same thing. (Though it's a little hard to tell at only 81kbps video). And Wired as a lengthy article about generating purely synthetic faces at Lucasfilm. It discusses some of the difficulties in getting it right."

Comments

Not to worry

[jcsehak]

I mean, this is pretty cool and all, but there's no reason to start worrying if someone's gonna put words in your mouth anytime soon. First they'd need:

1. a few minutes of footage of you saying stuff that has the full range of mouth movements directly into a camera.

2. an audio recording of you actually saying what it is that they want you to say. It's possible to cut and splice seperate recordings together, but 99% of the time, differences in the sound space would make it obvious that the recording was spliced together.

And then after that, all they'd have is a video of you saying the thing and staring like a zombie into the camera.

It's cool in theory, but I think Hollywood has done a lot better job at achieving better results.

Mmm, Gummi Venus De Milo...