Normally, you wouldn’t want to have a cannon aimed at your face, much less a cannon that can see your face and follow it around. But a team of mechanical and electrical engineering students at Olin College decided to challenge that notion with their marshmallow-firing Confectionary Cannon. It’s worth getting in this sucker’s sights.
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Here’s a program that could be one of the big hits of 2014. Currently in development by Holotech Studios, FaceRig lets anyone with a webcam project their head movements and facial expressions onto a virtual character, all in real time. It’s Dance Central for your face.
According to Holotech Studios, FaceRig is based on “real time image based tracking technology” made by Swedish company Visage Technologies. Aside from tracking and mapping your head and face, voice alteration will also be included in FaceRig. So you can become a voice actor, a motion capture actor and an animator all at once.
So what can you do with the FaceRig? For starters you can stream a show online using your avatar as your visage. You can be the next Hatsune Miku! Or rather, Half-sune Miku. You can make a simple animated film without spending a single second or cent in 3D modeling software. Or you can just make funny faces all day.
Holotech Studios plans to release several versions of FaceRig for different devices and use cases, such as a full featured desktop program for professional use and a mobile app for funny face use. For now a pledge of at least $5 (USD) on Indiegogo will be enough to score you both a beta and a full license to the basic version of FaceRig.
[via Incredible Things]
Redmond seems to have more grandiose ideas for Connected Car than it’s let on before, judging from a recent help wanted ad on its site. Reading more like PR for its car-based plans, the job notice waxes poetically about using “the full power of the Microsoft ecosystem” in an upcoming auto platform with tech such as Kinect, Azure, Windows 8 and Windows Phone. Those products would use face-tracking, speech and gestures to learn your driving habits and safely guide or entertain you on the road, according to the software engineer listing. It also hints that everything would be tied together using Azure’s cloud platform, so that your favorite music or shortcuts would follow you around, even if you’re not piloting your own rig. All that makes its original Connected Car plans from 2009 seem a bit laughable — check the original video for yourself after the break.
Continue reading Microsoft job posting hints at Connected Car strategy: Azure, Kinect and WP8
Microsoft job posting hints at Connected Car strategy: Azure, Kinect and WP8 originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 25 Jun 2012 12:47:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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