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Skulls Gain Virtual Faces
rw2 writes "Totally cool, The guys at Max Planck Institute for Computer Science have developed a way to reconstruct a persons appearence when a skull is found. When police find a skull and want to know what its owner looked like, they generally use artists who reconstruct the face by building up layers of clay over the skull."
How often do authorities find skulls? And how often do they need to know what that person looked like? I mean I would rather see a tool that could tell if a living person's skull was empty or not, now that I could see more of a use for. Unless of course you just assume that they are all pretty much empty, or at least non functional.
I wonder though, will this work with any skull, like a monkey skull? Or would it try to make the monkey look human?
"A synonym is a word you use when you can't spell the word you first thought of." - Burt Bacharach
I can't wait to see what that skeleton that hangs in the biology class lab looked like when it was alive!
Does everything include nothing?
They've been doing this on every discovery channel special on mummies I've seen for the last year.
Most recently the Nefertiti one that I watched just the other night.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
All the unearthed bones and petrified remains can be reconstructed with better accuracy now. Lets see some mugshots of neandrathal bastages.
Doesn't the Russian Mafia use base solutions to desolve "enemies", letting their flesh run down the drain, leaving only bones?
The real reason is to identify McBride's remains after his speech at Defcon.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
"I tell you everything. He look-a like-a man!"
"Ask me about Loom"
read it here from the Google cache
Interesting article, but just this weekend I watched a special on the Discovery Channel that included this very technique. The cable channel's Nefertiti Resurrected special climaxed with a computer-generated rendering of the "mystery" mummy's face, based on the skull and average tissue thickness at key points. They even noted that the technique was "much faster than traditional clay-sculpture reconstruction"... just like the referenced article.
Jump here to see the results.
By the way, I recommend watching the show. Call me superficial, but I liked the look of the actress who played the doomed queen -- especially her dark skin and freckles. Egypt gets a lot of sun, and SPF 45 was still about 2,900 years away. Much more convincing than Yul Brenner, and a darn sight better looking.
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
I wonder what it does if a part of the skull is missing. I bet that in many cases, if a skull is found by the police it was a murder. How would the software handle a bullet hole or if part of the skull was crushed. I didn't see it mentioned in the article.
Could be pretty interesting if there was an extra hole in the face and it put the eye in the wrong spot, or even added an extra one.
Finally we will know THE TRUTH!!!!
I went to battle MC Escher, but drew a blank
... but will it be able to reconstruct slashdotted servers from thier links?
Imagine all that clay savings! w00t!
Of course, maybe the forensics experts will miss playing with clay...
For archeology, it sounds cool. Will it work on older skulls, or is it homo sapiens only?
(tried RTFA... timeout! slashdotted already?)
Try the google cache.
This can not be the case. This is getting rediculous.
Were going to have to start diseminating slashdot stories on a staggered Timezone based schedule.
I love fancy new stuff like this, but as with all tools which render law enforcement work easier, there is an inherit danger that these tools are abused.
Everytime law enforcement is made easier, you must ask yourself if that improvement comes at the cost of making our society more like a police state.
Other recent examples are Scavenger, Total Information Awareness, and the PATRIOT act. Sure, on the surface they will make your everyday life safer, but at what cost? What liberties will you have to surrender?
How small a thought it takes to fill a whole life
How often do authorities find skulls? And how often do they need to know what that person looked like?
Well if you follow the national news at all you'd know that this happens a lot more than one would like to imagine it would.
I mean I would rather see a tool that could tell if a living person's skull was empty or not,
We could start with you, oh wait, your post is just as good to answer that question.
They solved a murder in northern wisconsin by using a sophisticated paper machine at MSOE.
it cut thin slices of paper in the shapes and built it upwards. basically you had a block of "wood" in the shape. the skull was the input.
that was neat stuff. clay isnt that cool compared to how this machine was utilized.
While this is a very cool idea, the article was missing a few details. For example, did they try it out on actual skulls and see how close they came to the former owner of that skull?
This last little bit of the article doesn't exactly sell this new technology:
' The current prototype figures suffer a problem common to computer-generated faces, said Evison "They look ridiculously mannequin-like."'
"The market alone cannot provide sufficient constraints on corporation's penchant to cause harm." -- Joel Bakan
Okay, but forensic scientists have been doing this by hand for years... There was even a MacGuyver episode where HE did it...
How do youo know if the person was a bit overweight and had a double chin or big cheeks? I know I looked ALOT different when I gained about 20 pounds and kept it for a few months till I couldn't afford pizza buffets anymore.
Also, how can a skull help you determine the shape of the person's eyebrows or the shape of their eyes? And they can't use race as a factor because I know alot of caucasians with various eye shapes.
Does it work on pre-human skulls? It would be great to see this work on EVE. It might be more accurate then the "artist's renditions."
Why not go for the full Karma Whoredom, and post the text? I'll go AC... you'll have to take me at my word that I didn't add any tidbits about goats, se, .cx, or CowboyNeal.
Skulls gain virtual faces
August 13/20, 2003
By Kimberly Patch, Technology Research News
When police find a skull and want to know what its owner looked like, they generally use artists who reconstruct the face by building up layers of clay over the skull.
Researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Computer Science in Germany have advanced efforts to computerize the process.
The method could speed forensic work, and could also be used to reconstruct long-extinct animal species, said Kolja Kahler, a researcher at the Max Planck Institute.
The idea came about when the researchers used an anatomy-based approach for facial modeling and animation. "One of the major problems there was shaping... anatomical structures to fit a given 3D skin model," said Kahler. The researchers later realized that the method could be inverted. "Using just about the same math, it is also possible to start from a virtual skull model and construct the muscle layer and skin on top of that," he said.
When they examined existing manual facial reconstruction methods, the researchers found that their method was "essentially the virtual counterpart to the de facto standard method used for manual facial reconstruction in police work," said Kahler.
There are two manual reconstruction methods. The anatomical method builds layers of muscles, glands and cartilage over the skull, then adds a skin layer. The second, faster method uses a set of average tissue thickness measurements to build up a face. The first method takes hundreds of hours, requires in-depth anatomical knowledge, and is more often used to reconstruct fossil faces. Where statistical data about a population -- like modern humans -- exists, the second method is more often used.
The researchers' software allows users to attach markers, or landmarks, to a three-dimensional skull model generated from a laser scan of a skull. The landmarks are correlated with statistical tissue depth measurements in order to provide reference points for the software to generate muscles and skin for the model.
An existing technique selects a computer-generated face from a database of faces and warps it to match the depth markers from landmarks on a skull. The researchers' approach, in contrast, has only one starting template and requires fewer landmarks, according to the researchers.
The model's virtual muscles control its animation. The muscles are connected to the skull and skin, and when muscles move, they also change the skin layer. The model can be edited by changing the location of the landmarks.
The method also includes rules that determine traits like the width of the nose and the position of the nose tip. The width of the mouth, the thickness of the lips, and the parting line between the lips are all determined by the size of the front few teeth.
The method is much faster than manual techniques, and can easily produce alternate models and different facial expressions, according to Kahler. It takes less than a day to make a computer reconstruction compared to weeks for a traditional clay model. Using the computer method, different facial expressions or slimmer or heavier versions of the face can be produced within seconds, according to Kahler. Because the clay methods are time-consuming, it is usually not practical to make alternate models.
The researchers' method works as well as the manual tissue depth method, according to the researchers.
The researchers' next step is collaborating with anthropologists and forensic artists to make the method practical, according to Kahler. "We have already established cooperation with the Institute for Forensic Medicine at Saarland University," he said.
The method is a clever combination of existing technologies, and is useful work, said Martin Evison,
PBS did a documentary over 10 years ago, showing how archeologists were able to reconstruct the facial features of an early human. They made a duplicate of the skull and applied muscle- and tissue-like structures until they had a very convincing full face of a heavy-browed early man.
Urantian -- and proud of it!
how long before the desktop version is out?
I wonder how you would test it? They should ban this, I mean it might cause people to start killing each other just so they can see if the software really works.
"A synonym is a word you use when you can't spell the word you first thought of." - Burt Bacharach
Seriously, how do they account for a tubby bastard? ...which nowdays is almost a certainty. That might throw off the model a bit if Skeletor is packing 350 lbs.
that watches those shows.
However, in some of them the artists still use the low-tech approach: they affix small pointed objects that look like pyramids (go figure) to the skull or to a new casting made from the skull. The pyramids represent typical depth of tissue at various points around the skull so the artists know how much clay/putty to apply.
A little OT, but I was fascinated by the X-ray approach used in the most recent [Nefertiti] special. The discovery of the broken-off right arm was a bit odd, though: the arm didn't go very far - about 2-3 feet - yet it remained "lost" for almost 100 years.
I want to drag this out as long as possible. Bring me my protractor.
IAALS.
i read 'max factor' first - i didnt eat much today and something seems to be wrong with me so it seemed logical they would know how to reconstruct a face being a cosmetics company and all - then it hit me that they wouldnt have an institute for computer science, they usually have some flashy institute for beta caleotones or whatever the latest face goo is called. .. max planck makes a lot more sense in the end than max factor.. maybe i shouldnt post this. or post it anonymously? ohwell
Of those to whom much is given, much is required.
Think about the features that people usually associate with a face: eyes, eyebrows, hair, nose, lips...
All of these features are soft, that is to say that there's very little chance you can extrapolate them from the skull's bone structure.
Yes, you can get the basic size of the lips and eyes, and the basic width of the nose. But you cannot tell the eye color, or the lip hue, or the actual shape of the nose or eyebrows.
You would need to extract such things from DNA, if that's even possible today.
Man is the animal that laughs.
And occasionally whores for Karma.
I mean...really...is it now our goal to put every last human being out of work? Are we seeking a society where every single man, woman and child operates a computer all day? What kind of dystopian society are we headed for?
"Hey Joe, how's it going?" "Well, my leg rotted off last night because I can't get medical care, my children starved to death cuz I have to work for $2 a day to compete with the Indians and Chinese and my wife and pets were raped by criminals because there's no point providing police for a nation of peasants. BUT I HAVE A REALLY COOL COMPUTER! And I hear Bill Gates is now living on Mars, sitting around watching Ice Station Zebra in the nude and cavorting with his hareem of former Survivor and Big Brother starlets. So I guess everything is just as it should be."
I've been swashdotted -- Elmer Fudd
This isn't the kind of technique you can meaningfully discuss without some sort of reported accuracy. If they take the skull of Don King and produce a computer generated image of Danny Devito, then it's not particularly useful.
...the next time in commiting a major crime, use acid for any leftover evidence... (joking!) :)
"Right now, somewhere in this world, Scott Baio is plowing a woman he doesn't love," - Peter Griffin, *Family Guy*
This sounds interesting, but sometimes this reconstruction thing can be taken way too far. I saw a special on either the Discovery Channel or TLC where they found half of a lower jaw bone. From this, they reconstructed the rest of the jaw. Then they reconstructed the rest of the face and head. Then they figured out his eating habits. Then from those eating habits they figured out the whole lifestyle of this guy, from only his jaw bone.... It was interesting but didn't seem very believable.
such techniques?
I've seen this technique used in "found skeletal remains" crime investigations and archeological investigations and have always wondered if the technique was accurate or just being done for dramatic effect.
Maybe they could dig up a skull of someone who has an available photograph. Give the skull to three "artists" and see how close the results compare.
Trying to rebuild a face from nothing more than a skull is nonsense. It'd be like trying to recreate my whole body from a skeleton. How do you know how much I weigh, what color I am, if I have a hairy back, or whatever? Skulls and other bones aren't like fingerprints or snowflakes. And yet faces are unique. So how can a unique face be built from a generic skull? Even when they had artists doing this with clay most cops knew it was pretty much useless. They only use this technique if they have absolutely nothing else to go on like DNA, or dental charts.
Support the First Amendment. Read at -1
i know a way of reconstructing a face from just a strand of dna ...skull ! bah !
Sure you have the facial bones, but you have no idea how thick their muscles were, how fleshy their skin was, lip size, what their eyebrows were like, eye color, eyelid characteristics.
There was one study where they gave the same skull model to five different artists and they got back 5 very different heads.
The only way you could to this accurately would be to decode any DNA you find and grow their face, virtually (or in some vat -- yech). The technology is a long way off, needless to say.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
Yeah, he's only got about 6 posts in his history; he's still learning. Troll on!
Geesh - RTFA! Somebody is gonna kill you and the police will need this to identify you!
This is computer software; not clay and tissue like you mentioned. If you had read the article, you would have learned that this takes less time.
This is not new. Doesn't anybody watch CSI? With the aid of computer technology they are able to zoom in on images taken from blurry security cameras to be able to tell if there is a carpet fiber on the jacket of the person in the very same picture! I'm sure they're able to fully rebuild a complete person from just the skeletal structure, muscles and all. They can probably interpolate from marks on the skeleton and thanks to that guy that knows everything he could probably help out b/c chances are he knew the guy. TV wouldn't lie to me!! Would it...?? *cowers in the corner*
Just because your imagination limits the use for this technology, it doesn't mean that it can't be abused at all.
What if they applied it in reverse for example? They could ruin the livelihood of frenologists all over the US.
How small a thought it takes to fill a whole life
what sort of results would we get if we ran michael jackson's skull through it?
I'll turn into a supernova and burn up everything. Well I'll turn into a black little hole and you'll turn into string.
The person is also going to look much different based on the climate, diet, amount of exercise, probably even occupation and social class to some extent.
Jon Acheson
All opinions expressed herein are my own, and not those of my employers, who are appalled.
You could use virtual historical characters from skull reconstructs to play the actual individuals. Getting Henry the Eights head out of the grave might be a pain though. Oh no now we might have a real version of Otsi "or however you spell it" the ICE MAN COMETH! A giant spectacle with European Ice man shorties taking on Arnold the Testosterone Giant. That would be a hoot.
OH THE SHAME I fell off the wagon and use sigs again!
This has been going on for years allready!
Slashdot, News for retards. Stuff that pretends to matter!
Only my program created a virtual skull from a person's appearance. Until they used my program, police assumed they were looking for a missing person. They never realized that if a homicide had occurred the person they were searching for might actually look like a skeleton.
...we will finally be able to see what Calista Flockhart REALLY looks like?
Ed Wedig
Graphic design services
docbrown.net
Take your -1 Offtopic like the beeotch you are! You know you like it!
...until they can get the flesh color right automatically ;-)
Looking for any old 8-bit Heathkit/Zenith software/hardware - http://heathkit.garlanger.com
http://slushdot.org/mirror/skulls/Skulls_gain_virt ual_faces_081303.html
She going down! And not in the good sense of that sentence!
When police find a skull and want to know what its owner looked like, they generally use artists who reconstruct the face by building up layers of clay over the skull.
Researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Computer Science in Germany have advanced efforts to computerize the process.
The method could speed forensic work, and could also be used to reconstruct long-extinct animal species, said Kolja Kahler, a researcher at the Max Planck Institute.
The idea came about when the researchers used an anatomy-based approach for facial modeling and animation. "One of the major problems there was shaping... anatomical structures to fit a given 3D skin model," said Kahler. The researchers later realized that the method could be inverted. "Using just about the same math, it is also possible to start from a virtual skull model and construct the muscle layer and skin on top of that," he said.
When they examined existing manual facial reconstruction methods, the researchers found that their method was "essentially the virtual counterpart to the de facto standard method used for manual facial reconstruction in police work," said Kahler.
There are two manual reconstruction methods. The anatomical method builds layers of muscles, glands and cartilage over the skull, then adds a skin layer. The second, faster method uses a set of average tissue thickness measurements to build up a face. The first method takes hundreds of hours, requires in-depth anatomical knowledge, and is more often used to reconstruct fossil faces. Where statistical data about a population -- like modern humans -- exists, the second method is more often used.
The researchers' software allows users to attach markers, or landmarks, to a three-dimensional skull model generated from a laser scan of a skull. The landmarks are correlated with statistical tissue depth measurements in order to provide reference points for the software to generate muscles and skin for the model.
An existing technique selects a computer-generated face from a database of faces and warps it to match the depth markers from landmarks on a skull. The researchers' approach, in contrast, has only one starting template and requires fewer landmarks, according to the researchers.
The model's virtual muscles control its animation. The muscles are connected to the skull and skin, and when muscles move, they also change the skin layer. The model can be edited by changing the location of the landmarks.
The method also includes rules that determine traits like the width of the nose and the position of the nose tip. The width of the mouth, the thickness of the lips, and the parting line between the lips are all determined by the size of the front few teeth.
The method is much faster than manual techniques, and can easily produce alternate models and different facial expressions, according to Kahler. It takes less than a day to make a computer reconstruction compared to weeks for a traditional clay model. Using the computer method, different facial expressions or slimmer or heavier versions of the face can be produced within seconds, according to Kahler. Because the clay methods are time-consuming, it is usually not practical to make alternate models.
The researchers' method works as well as the manual tissue depth method, according to the researchers.
The researchers' next step is collaborating with anthropologists and forensic artists to make the method practical, according to Kahler. "We have already established cooperation with the Institute for Forensic Medicine at Saarland University," he said.
The method is a clever combination of existing technologies, and is useful work, said Martin Evison, a senior lecturer in forensic and biological anthropology at the University of Sheffield in England. "It would be good to have a practical method of reconstructing the face from the skull by computer in forensic cases," he said. "Clay sculpture is time-consuming and can require considerable artistic talent."
This looks like the same software used on the Discovery Channel's Nefertiti Resureced show last weekend.
I'm not kidding, here's the episode synopsis, with pictures: The Secret of Parker House [geocities].
If they did the inverse: from an external scan of a living person's head, construct what their skull looks like. It would be easy to do with a CT scan, but you need a doctor's prescription for one of those.
Think about it, who wouldn't want a model of their own skull on their desk? Imagine the Hamlet-esque possibilities.
http://www.mpi-sb.mpg.de/units/ag4/areas/FacialMod eling/
Damn, one more job taken away from artists by geeks and their technology. Clay and maquettes are relics of an earlier time. Long live clay and maquette! long live the 3d scanner!
I can't remember the last time I had a good skull fucking....
With a spell checker, you would've written 'resurrected'.
In this you can see a face reconstructed from a skull, all computer generated, no clay.
Speak for yourself.
With all the work going on with stem cell research now I bet it's not long til you can grow a skull from a strand of hair. Then just slap a face on it.
when MacGuyver did this years ago using eraser heads to build up the thickness of the skin and then recreate the face of a skull he found?
Upgrade your grey matter, cause one day it may matter
haha, i was just going to post that but I didn't have a synopsis.
incidentally, the story summary even mentions that " they generally use artists who reconstruct the face by building up layers of clay over the skull." compared to using software so I don't know why there are so many 'this is old news' posts.
I'll admit I don't always read the articles but I at least read the summary on slashdot.
I think he's talking about the Micheal Jackson they had in his class. We had one too. He'd pat your ass, let it linger a little, then stand on his tippy toes and go, "Yeeeeew!" Sometimes he'd spin.
Have they reconstructed Otzi the warrior's face yet. Any pictures?
Cool technology though. I wonder if they could extrapolate to the skeleton maybe by scraping the bones or looking at dna to get a body fat percentage and then get a full body view.
I wonder DNA analysis could yield body hair, musculature, and other specifics to find a full body picture. Imagine, we might get to see computer generated pr0n of our ancient ancestors. How hot would that be?
...or in more to watch TV. I've seen this type of thing on various television shows for years. And Taco thinks it's "Neet!" cuz he just found out about it.
No wonder I've been spending most of my "drool over the 'net" time on FARK lately...
/.: why the hell am I here?
Now I have to worry about future archeologists finding out just how ugly I was in life?
I also covered this subject today on my blog where I gave some additional references, including an illustration of a face reconstruction process.
And remember that this software was shown during last Siggraph. New Scientist published "Animation lets murder victims have final say" on this work about two weeks ago with a nice illustration, "How the dead can express themselves."
In "Skulls gain virtual faces," Technology Research News didn't give much more information.
is that all you bitches got? a bunch of bullshit slap talking? who cares if somebody posts as a logged-in user or not? you guys sound like a couple of 3rd graders. if anyone ought to be receiving insults here, it's you for taking yourselves so fucking seriously. jesus, it's just a threaded discussion... did you even read the article, or do you only care about your karma agenda?
They've been doing this for years (computer based not clay). I dont see why its newsowrthy to mention it now.
I'll call your MacGyver and raise you a Quincy.
Maybe I should RTFA, but I doubt that, when the Animal Learning Discovery Travel Court Channel showed a face reconstruction from a skull last week, the method was subjected to SCIENTIFIC SCRUTINY. For instance, judges could compare each CAD face to a series of photos, one of them being an actual photo of the skull model (old family photos could be used if the skull model is deceased) and select their best guess. If the average correct photo cannot be selected by more than N% of the judges, the technique cannot be held to be scientifically valid.
Why don't people demand this level of veracity from everything in their life? People down herbal placebos by the truckload and spend big bucks for "ancient Chinese traditional medicine" without even realizing or caring that no scientific study has ever verified such practices. People don't even understand what science IS. They think scientific ideas are just one class of things, existing alongside "traditional," "spiritual," or "alternative" theories. This is ludicrous. There are only two categories of things - things that truly exist or truly work, and things that don't. And the only reliable way to tell them apart is through the scientific method, not an appeal to the supernatural or something's ancientness. How can people have been so inadequately educated? Ugh! I hate everybody.
Sorry, my misanthropy flared up again (as I have trained it to). But on a related note, the Animal Learning Discovery Travel Court Channel also has lots of other forensics shows where they show hair analysis and "blood spatter analysis." And I want to know whether ANY of these things have ever been scientifically established, or whether (and this is my suspicion) they're partially or totally bogus but more than convincing enough to fool the average jury member - who himself probably wears an energy crystal and watches John Edward every week. I'm skeptical about even fingerprint analysis. Has there ever been a study done to support them? I don't know. Every schoolboy is taught about fingerprints and how each one is unique, but what if their effectiveness is just an urban legend that even law enforcement believes? After all, every schoolboy knows about lie detectors too, and those are notorious for being totally bogus, completely unable to withstand and kind of scientific scrutiny. Polygraphs aren't even allowed as evidence. (But, of course, the federal government still uses them for hiring - further proof that the government is stupider even than the average fool.)
I just hope I'm never accused of a crime. Who knows what kind of "analysis" they'll have come up with. "My office analyzed the victim's facial muscles using muscular memory analysis, and I can say with 99.999847% certainty that the last words formed by her mouth were 'No!' followed by the defendant's name."
What Would Jesus Do
(for a Klondike bar)?
Thought it said "Skulls Gain Virtual *Feces*".
Oops!
Where's the freakin tarball? I'm dying to try this out.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
They climaxed on the mummy's face? Well, as long as they didn't get any in her hair I guess.
I mean, on MacGyver, you got to watch as he cut off the eraser ends of a bunch of pencils and then put it all on the skull. We're talking step-by-step instructions here.
Thats how the terminator's face was made so life-like! The robots from the future must be using this software to make really realistic faces.
--- to swing on the spiral...
Does this mean they can reverse engineer my face to get a picture of my skull?
I've never seen any photos of someone in real-life and then the reconstructed version. This would be possible with a few pictures of those that have died recently. Just find the family and get a picture of them after the software has done it's thing.
I'd like to see just how close they come to actually getting it right.
Actually, this method (3 dimensional reconstruction of musculature and flesh upon skulls) has been used within anthropology. Here's a site with some interesting photos and explanations of the process used. Pretty informational. Enjoy.
"People are not born bastards. They have to work at it." ~Rod McKuen~
This is the Yackov Shmirnov slashdot. We no longer do russia/america jokes, just observations about life and such.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
Just put the google cache moron on your foes list and be done with it. We all know someone that lame isn't work seeing. Or fighting with.
You beat me to the issue I thought of, but not the application: How about they take a CAT scan (or something), extract the skull portion (or even the skull portion plus muscle portion), then generate models of you with x% less body fat? Could be a great motivator...
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
Hell.. there was an episode of MacGuyver where he did the same thing with some pencil erasers and some clay! Richard Dean Anderson.. facial reconstruction pioneer.
For those interested, the paper is available from ACM's digital library.
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There's a lot of evidences that the egyptians were a black people. Sure it is difficult for some white people to believe that the once greatest civilization in the world were a bunch of niggers. That's better to put Elisabeth Taylor to play Cleopatra.
Now another revelation: Egypt is in Africa!
Am I the only one that remembers the Macguyver episode where he did this with the pencils and clay? Or am I the only one willing to admit it?
So now I'm thinking of this backwards -- what would Gumby's skeleton look like?
Small potatoes make the steak look bigger.
This forensic technique was shown in the book and movie "Gorky Park" by Martin Cruz Smith from the mid-1980's.
I usually assume that any technique shown in a movie is real and in current professional use. However I'm beginning to wonder if filmmakers simply fantasize about a technology and then portray it as real on the screen.
Two other examples of this type of technological 'projection' that is possibly fantasy are:
1> Near the end of "Being There" (1980) with Peter Sellars, there is a scene where a wealthy man adjusts his will using a real-time speech-to-text convertor. Such a device may not have existed at the time that the movie was made.
2> "Three Days of the Condor" 1975 -- Near the beginning of a CIA spy movie with Robert Redford and Faye Duniway there is a scene where a red laser is doing Optical Character Recognition on Chinese characters at about 20 - 40 characters per second. The laser is reading the characters off a piece of paper like a bar-code scanner.
Does anyone else have examples of technology that is shown in movies that is being portrayed as current but is actually about ten to twenty years from being developed?
Thank you,
Simonetta
CSI is a great show, with supposedly real forensic science. But every time they do that zoom into a picture / blow up a video by a factor of 8 crap, I'm forced to wonder how much of the forensics is accurate. Because you sure as hell can't blow up video like they do in the show. Where does the extra data come from?
Doesn't help that they do this every other episode.
I saw this on MacGyver like 15 years ago
Come on, give it up, that's
"Did you mean phrenologist?"
from dictionary.com
phrenology n. The study of the shape and protuberances of the skull, based on the now discredited belief that they reveal character and mental capacity.
Mind you there are so many frenologists on google, that it seems to have adopted the new spelling.
Btw I think that the cgi reconstruction looks more like Angelina Jolie than the limestone statue in the Berlin Museum.
-- it must be true, it's on the internet.
That's because the people who did the program probably find Angelina Jolie much more attractive. It's good that those of us who can spell have gotten beyond phrenology, then again since when has the government ever cared about using psuedo-science to scare people. You could just tell someone that you have a computer program that reverse engineers (coment to earlier comment), the shape and form of their skull and then uses 'state of the art' (in 1844) phrenological techniques to determine whether or not they have a murderous temperment. This could be like the next lie detector, except you don't even have to posses any actual equipment just a few nice x-rays of some skulls.
Seriously, the only technology that helps the government overstep its bounds is technology that's given some sort of mythic power by the pop culture to doing something that is in all reality just a load of bull. The best way to keep our privacy is to stop talking about it on these boards and talk to the people on the street who keep saying that they'd feel safer from terrorist threats if the government could know more about us than ourselves. Come on folks, let's get out there and initiate voter referendums to reinforce actual democratic ideals, like free speech, and the ability to whack off without the government knowing the rough mass of your ejaculate (okay, that was way too far, I apologize).
How about my boss Michael Jackson, who is, unlike the singer Michael Jackson, black. Then there's my neighbor Michael Jackson, who is white like Mike.
A former schoolmate at the full scholarship Cooper Union brought his cool package, The Expression Toolkit, into open source. Expression is an animation system based on an anatomical model of the face. Using basic muscle simulations instead of morph targets, Expression simplifies the creation of lifelike characters, allowing a face to be set up in a matter of hours instead of days. Written in C++ and OpenGL, Expression is a general-purpose framework for real-time facial animation in games and web applications.
From the FAQ As far as I know, it has still not reached a critical mass of users
MacGyver used pencil erasers.
The evaluation of an action as 'practical' . . . depends on what it is that one wishes to practice.
I've always wanted to get a CT scan or MRI of my skull, and make a model of it on a rapid prototyping machine. Then I could get a face reconstruction done and see what they come up with. I think it would be fascinating. And I'd have a model of my own skull. How cool would that be?
TTFN
coulda read it first (and better) at New Scientist!
to get voter initiated referendums and we nearly always vote no "to" change the constitution, unless we get "bipartizan" support ie both our left and right parties support the change. I can't see that happening.
Currently our little dictator is trying to get a constitional reform through that would allow him to make laws and pass them without discussion or review. I don't think he gets it. He doesn't have a majority in our house of review for a reason, and every single state government is currently run by the leftish party (ie the opposite to his party). Thats usually the way it is, if the Libs are in the Fed Govt, then Labor is in the State Govts, and nobody ever has a complete majority in the Fed House of Review (Senate). Its called balance and looking after the little people, something he's forgotten about.
He sure is good at using Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt though. Scare tactics based on absolutely nothing. I don't think they bother with science. Just look at all the WMD they found YKW. Not. Hmm, don't they just shoot the scientists.
I think the USA government would be better if convicted criminals weren't allowed to run it. And I include non-elected support staff in that exclusion. Wasn't Poindexter convicted of defrauding the Government back when the democrats were in, and isn't Dick Chaney in some sort of legal trouble (frequently). And doesn't W' Bush have about 4 years of his life just missing from the Biog's?
I'm not usually a radical but it seems to me that standing up for basic human rights like the right to a fair trial now is a radical thing. WTF is going on in G'Bay?
-- it must be true, it's on the internet.
"Hello? Is this the stiff you're looking for?"
It would be interesting to do some form of double-translation equivalent (You know, translation from English to, say, French and back again);
X-ray someones' head, feed this into the program and compare the input/output. May be useful to compare accuracy?
Yeah, it is nice to have a balance in government between one group and another, that way the whack jobs in one group can't force the whack jobs in another to do anything they don't want to.
The biggest problem that I ever found was that the US constitution is "We the people hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal and endowed by god with certain inalienable rights" those of life, liberty, and the pursuit of property. But then again we only apply it to Americans and other white first world nationals, despite the fact that the clear intention is for all human beings. Holding people without trials and calling enemey soldiers (despite the level of douchebaggery they might have been involved in during Afghanistan, Taliban fighters were still soldiers for a government that the US gave a bunch of money to for the 'War on Drugs', I mean, we called Nazi soldiers what they were even though they were massacring everyone who wasn't a white person of germanic descent left and right) enemy combatants just so you don't have to treat them like human beings.
That kind of treatment only makes us stoop down to their level. After all, just because we don't hitnk that they're deserving of inalienable rights doesn't mean that we're right, after all the Taliban didn't think that women had any rights and look where that got them.{end rant)