Create Your Favorite Actor From Nothing But Photos (i-programmer.info)

mikejuk writes: If you always wanted to see John Wayne play the lead in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, you might not have to wait much longer. A University of Washington team has essentially reversed engineered what makes an actor recognizable as that actor, or as the title of the paper puts it, "What Makes Tom Hanks Look Like Tom Hanks." It explains how using nothing but photos and videos from the web it is possible to create an actor puppet that follows the expressions of a driver (i.e. a puppeteer). Now you really can see actors perform things they never got around to performing. The model of the "puppet" is first created using photos from the web. The next stage is to analyze a video of the "driver", i.e. to work out the deformations in the puppet needed to make it follow the driver. ... What they discovered: "After a great deal of experimentation, we obtained surprisingly convincing results using the following simple recipe: use actor B's shape, B's texture, and A's motion (adjusted for the geometry of B's face)."

Comments

Two uses: political satire and something else

[John Allsup]

I can see two uses for this tech: political satire (making politicians visibly move like the puppets they often are) and a certain slightly naughtier sort of entertainment.

Re:Failed Actors

[Hognoxious]

An actor who I 'recognize' is an actor who has failed at their job.

Huh? I'm not saying the LoTR films are the bestest thing evaaaah. But I can clearly see that Gandalf is, in his spare time, Sir Ian McKellen - even if I'm not going "crikey, that's Sir Ian McKellen!" every time he pops up.

So I recognised him. Does that mean he's failed?