Creating the face of the future

By MICHAEL FOREMAN

Auckland graphics software company Right Hemisphere is poised to launch a program that will accurately synthesise three-dimensional representations of the human face.

Right Hemisphere founder Mark Thomas said the program, codenamed Character Weapons, would be marketed as a professional graphics tool but he was not ruling out a consumer version.

Character Weapons would be competing with several face-creation programs, Mr Thomas said, but an outstanding feature of the Right Hemisphere product was its ability to "mate" two faces.

This feature went beyond ordinary blending as it used computational techniques borrowed from genetics involving "creating genes and then splicing them together."

Mr Thomas believed the mating feature was accurate enough to give prospective parents a fair idea of what their offspring might look like as adults.

The parents' facial characteristics had to be captured with 3D scanners.

But Character Weapons will be more commonly used by graphic artists to design three-dimensional facial images by manipulating characteristics such as the nose, chin, mouth or overall head shape using simple intuitive controls.

As each facial element obeys individual transformation rules, the faces created could range from the lifelike to grotesque caricatures without breaking the bounds of credibility.

"If you alter the length of the nose, you'll get a different effect to what you'd get if you had altered the chin for example," Mr Thomas said.

The market for such a package could be broad as it could be used wherever there was a need for the rapid creation of lifelike facial images, for films, web animations, or "avatars" such as virtual newsreaders.

"The human face from the eyes outward is the single most compelling object outside of our own consciousness, so it's natural that it will be used as an attention-getter in all sorts of applications.

"Our initial research shows people are much more interested in cartoon-type personas than photorealistic people in most applications.

"They are simply more fun."

Character Weapons requires some final tweaking but Mr Thomas expects to release the package in about a month.

Character Weapons has been designed to be compatible with Right Hemisphere's existing Deep Paint and Texture Weapons applications and the faces created can be exported to Poser, the market-leading computer-generated human figure software application manufactured by United States-based Curious Labs.

"We are also interested to discuss [computer-generated faces for criminal recognition] potential with New Zealand Police but have yet to make contact there," said Mr Thomas.

Right Hemisphere, which has recently moved into new premises in Newmarket, employs 30 people, 17 of whom are engaged in development.

Links


Right Hemisphere

Curious Labs