Nvidia, a visual computing technology company from Santa Clara, released their Faceworks demo at the GPU Tech Conference—it was beautiful, but slightly creepy.

Faceworks renders realistic human faces, using human likeness and familiarity with expressions for their facial simulations. We understand what a normal human looks like; our eyes pick up on every detail. Graphics have to cover depth of field, soft shadows, and skin pores.

With the help of USC’s Institute for Creative Technology, they created the idea of using a light stage.  (What is a light stage? It’s a sphered room of 156 cameras that take pictures to gather 3D geometries to turn into video. Duh.) The team gathered roughly 30 expressions to create a mosaic of how humans move, and compressed it for real-time use.

This revolution of character performance could influence video games, avatars, and possibly, video conferencing.

Image provided by Abad Mahava

Sourced: GamesHQMedia

Curated: Online Editor @stnkvtsch