Siggraph

Steve Perlman wants to make 3D face capture as easy as possible. And not just ’sorta okay’ capture that might do for games, but sub-millimeter accurate capture delivered without the usual mini-ping pong balls or other markers that today’s pricey, high-end systems require.

Perlman, CEO of SF-based Mova, has a varied career as a top Apple engineer, co-founder of WebTV Networks, and Moxi, the innovative set-top box company. Now, with the release of Contour (currently offered as a service, but soon to be a turnkey product), users need to merely dab on common phosphorescent face paint (the same stuff kids use for Halloween) and stand in front of an array of capture cameras.

Instead of the time consuming vertice manipulation required of other systems, not to mention the labor intensive data clean-up usually required, Contour just works. The irregular dabs of face paint are tracked and triangulated by the cameras, fed to the program, and delivered in realtime. One demo even re-mapped the model’s face texture on the resultant 3D mask generated to make a photorealistic 3D character in record speed.

Instead of capturing points on the skin, the system captures the whole skin, and even does clothing at the same time, something never acheived. DVD viewers would be able to change the look of the movie’s actors in realtime, lengthening a nose, trimming fat, and otherwise manipulating what was once flat, unchangeable media.

This could be fun.