You smile, they smile: GDC Wednesday

One of the more memorable booths for me at the 2009 Game Developers Conference was Optitrack’s face motion capture demo.

In it, they had a girl wearing reflective facial markers at different points on her face, along with a headband with more markers. As she moved her face, a screen behind her with three corresponding animated faces also moved in sync. When the model blinked, the three characters blinked. When the model smiled, the three characters would smile. All of her head and facial movements were transmitted through the system, and more than a few passers-by stopped to check out the subtle movements of the giant ogre, valiant warrior, and fresh-faced youth on the screen behind her.

Facial motion capture is essentially achieved through the use of cameras or scanners to convert the movements of a model or actor’s face into a digital database. Reflective markers, like the ones on the demo girl’s face, are used as reference points, and that information is transmitted to produce computer graphics, movies, animation, etc. With real-time facial tracking, an avatar’s movements and expressions result in more nuance and accuracy, making for better games and more realistic acting or movement.

Being the eye-tracking blogger I am, one thing I noticed was that the model’s eye movements didn’t correspond with the characters. In fact, the characters were not moving their eyes at all – they just had a dull, rather lifeless stare. This, of course, was due to the model’s inability to attach reflective markers to her eyes – a problem that would be easily solved with developing eye-tracking devices like Eye-Com and Tobii. The demo was interesting for the realistic movements the animated characters would make, but I couldn’t help but notice how much better it would have been had the eyes been moving along, following the random GDC visitor as they ambled past Optitrack’s booth.

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