Augmented Reality Ventriloquism

Here we are with some more Faceball experiments! If you've been following along with our AR demos so far, then you've seen that Talking Dog Studios has been working on a series of web pages that use both marker-tracking and face-tracking technologies to grab the real-time image of your face and map it in various creative ways.

Starting with expandar.com (pictured at left) and Alice in AR Land (at right), we showed you some of the startling effects that can be achieved with just face-tracking. Then, with Faceball 1, we added in the marker, which let you map your own face to a sphere. And with Faceball 2, we showed you how this could allow you to hold your head in your hands.

If you were wondering where we would take this next, take a look at Faceball demo 3:


This one shows you how it's possible to become other characters, like in our Alice in Wonderland page, except that the character is more convincingly part of the real world.

Where, you might be wondering, will we go after this? No need to wonder any longer, because we've gone ahead and created a finished application from these demos. The culmination of all our hard work and experimentation has come down to this one point:

AR ventriloquism.

That's right, you can create dialogues between yourself and your virtual self in much the same way that real ventriloquists do. Check out our coder Rene Dufour-Contreras, who wrote and performed this strangely existential piece about a guy realizing he's just a virtual head:


Notice that Rene's mouth is covered with a still image of his mouth when the dummy is talking and the dummy's mouth does not move when Rene is speaking. You can try this, and all the other faceball demos out at www.talkingdogstudios.com/ar/faceball

This is just one application for this technology. By mapping a person's face in real time to a character in a game they are playing, or in a movie they are watching, you are creating a much more personal and engaging experience for them. Could your next project use this new innovation? Give it some thought and give us a call!

Augmentedly,

The Talking Dog AR team

Faceball Demo 2

With the past few entries we've showed you our Expandar and Alice in Wonderland pages which use face tracking, for a form of Augmented Reality that doesn't require you to print out a marker. Then we showed you our Faceball page, which you can visit here if you want to try it out yourself. The first version mapped the viewer's face to a ball. Now here's a demo that shows what happens when you map the person's face to a 3D mesh representing a human head. Check it out!


A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jKIv3Pt6zjI

Pretty unusual looking, wouldn't you say? Again, this is just an experiment, but we see some good opportunities coming up for where this idea could take us: imagine watching a 3D CGI movie where no matter where you as a viewer are sitting, and no matter how close or far you are from your webcam, you see yourself as the face of one of the characters in the show. Talk about immersive entertainment!

Just to review, here's what our first "Faceball" demo looked like:


A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YSGmlmtFmt0

Each day we move another step towards our augmented reality future. And we can't wait to get there!

The Talking Dog AR team.

Faceball Demo 1

Here's a little experiment we thought we would put up in its beginning stages. It's a followup to our Expandar and Alice in Wonderland pages using face tracking, for a form of Augmented Reality that doesn't require you to print out a marker. You can find the faceball page here .


A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YSGmlmtFmt0

We're calling this video "Faceball Demo 1" because we see this as just the beginning for where this could lead. We're imagining all the fun characters that could be created using this technique, and possibilities for interactive story telling or gaming. Please comment on the video over at youtube or here on this blog and let us know what you think. The augmented reality division of Talking Dog Studios is constantly trying to hone its tool box and your feedback really helps us as we decide what avenues to pursue next.

May all your days be augmented ones!

The Talking Dog AR team

Alice in AR land

Last time we looked at our new website mixing face tracking and augmented reality: expandAR.com. This time we'd like to talk more about a proof-of-concept experiment we've just posted at expandAR.com/w using the same technology: with this version, instead of the software messing with their own face, the user sees themselves transformed into four of the characters from Disney's new hit film, Alice in Wonderland. The images used to create this demo are, of course, © 2010 by Walt Disney Pictures.

Can you imagine watching a program or a commercial where you see yourself inserted into the action using the approach we're showing here, with your face changing to different characters, or being modified in interesting ways as different things happen to you? So can we!

We see this as a starting point for something that any film, television, or commercial producer could use to allow people to see themselves as part of the action, to become part of the show. It's important to remember as you look at these stills from the site that this is really full-motion video of the user being inserted into these faces, which makes the experience just that much more engaging. What about a website that shows clips from famous movies and lets people see themselves as an interesting/amusing part of the clip? Talk about your remix culture.

Also, there are other interactive story-telling options here: users could be presented with choices, and depending upon their response they would see themselves transformed in various ways. Likewise, this could make for an immersive and entertaining educational or gaming experience.

Several things are happening to make this magic happen. First of all, facial recognition software is locating the user's face, and continually adjusting for their position within the image and how near/far they are from their webcam. Then, real-time video is being grabbed of the person's face. The image of this face is adjusted in real time to match the color and brightness of Tim Burton's imaginative images. In some cases the face is also being warped or tilted to have it match the look of the film's characters even more.

The fact that all this is able to be done in flash, so it doesn't require the user to download any additional software makes this a great promotional tool. The fact that it is a form of augmented reality that doesn't require the user to print out a marker also ensures that more people will be likely to try the site out.

In case you missed it from last time, we're going to close here with our movie demonstrating the original version of expandAR. Thank you to the people who have sent us pictures of themselves having their reality expanded in various crazy ways by the expandAR website, please keep 'em coming!

And if you are a film or television producer looking for an innovative way to engage your audience, let us know, we'd love to discuss how Augmented Reality might be just the solution you've been looking for.


A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FToeYWCAoYk

May all your days be augmented ones,

The Talking Dog AR team.

PS - Talking Dog president Rob Bryanton has also posted an entry about this over at his Imagining the Tenth Dimension blog, check it out.

Twitter Trends

Here at Talking Dog Studios we've been experimenting over the last little while with connecting to the twitter API in order to display trends and such in an Augmented Reality window. Here's a little something we came up that we're calling "Trend Face". This Flash app lets you see the world's trends attached to the side of your face, changing in real time as words rise and fall in popularity. There's a couple of other features - you can click on any trend word and immediately see its most recent tweets, and there's a search function that lets you see the most recent tweet referencing the search term you entered.

Please check it out at talkingdogstudios.com/ar/trendface and tell us what you think. It's a fun little project and who knows: you might even learn a thing or two about what matters to the twitterverse right this instant.

Speaking of that, you can take a picture of yourself and the current "moment in time" trends, for you to look back at for years to come: save it to your hard drive or share it with your Facebook friends. And for lots more tweets about Augmented Reality-related stuff we find interesting, be sure to follow us twitter @talkingdogar .

Cheers!

The Talking Dog AR team