$100 webcam maps expressions to avatars.

This kinda thing is right out of Snow Crash.

http://slfuturesalon.blogs.com/second_life_future_salon/2006/03/glitchy_link_on.html

Play the second video, toward the end, where you see this girl do facial expressions with packaged software on a $100 webcam.

It would behoove Linden Lab to immediately hire some staff to make this technology available to map directly to avatar.

In the meantime, I predict at least 2 other MMOs go ahead and implement this before Second Life.

http://secondtense.blogspot.com/2006/03/webcammy-goodness.html

Hah! That's really nifty. I don't know if I want people to see the expression that's really on my face when I'm chatting with them, though.

Dear Resmods
Please move to "blog link thinly disguised as a new story" forum. If we don't have one, we oughter.
Cali

Yeah it's cool. Here's how it works(big pdf) in case anyone's interested.

That's awesome, if we had that, everyone ingame could see my snarky expressions.

Wonder if it works if you wear glasses...

I remember reading about using this sort of system for mobile phones a while back. They were going to generate a face avatar of each person, send that to the person you were talking to and then watch your face and move the bits of the avatar. The reason being that it saves bandwidth to send instructions to move an avatar rather than sending the whole frame.

Again the bandwidth issues which are already starting to show with SL's current system., and imagine the weirdness, you're having a serious conversation with a partner, and you realise they're watching TV as they keep laughing and then looking serious XD Until more physically immersive virtual reality comes along I don't see the point, it'd be expensive and pointless to put in, I'd rather they'd fix the abundance of bugs first than put in something like this.

Not that I don't think it's absolutely awesome, just, priorities and actual usage.

Facial Expression Mapping will be a feature of The Metaverse. Stephenson said it was so.

I want my sidekick to know that I really am raiding an aircraft carrier cum refugee camp and I'm scared shitless and fighting for my life, and aren't just a home surfing for porn.

YADNI and seagel made a facial HUD anyone want one just ask me! the emote hud gives you facial expressions and needs to be integrated into SL somehow in the future i hope so i.e. emote hud on/off button please! this typing in thin air has got to STOP unless im wearing a keyboard all day long?? uh.... looks down *laughs*..okkkk well ahem* Please give our face expressions and put our air guitar keyboards away! thanks!

Is this the one with the girl lamenting her break-up and playing with virtual glasses, gas mask, aso?

The first video est neat, but you gotta watch the second video! Woots! We need that NOW!!!

Yeah, and I believe this is totally a case of "Wow, I didn't realize how piss-poor Logitech's marketing is if it's me, a teenage girl, who starts the buying craze and becomes an instant cyberlebrity."

I don't want facial expression mapping, I want posture mapping.

There's already kids games that recognise body movements on webcams, even against a cluttered background. Having it just map upper body posture into a handful of animations (leaning back, leaning forward, fidgeting, scratching head, ...) would significantly aid immersion.

This could be scripted, even. Making it scripted would be better in many ways... imagine what Starax would do with llUserPose(). and the changed_posture() event.

There was an article on C|Net (I think) late last week talking not about the tech, but the marketing. Might be worth finding. I saw some comments suggesting it was actually a deliberate viral marketing effort. I don't know if it is or not, but it's gotten plenty of buzz.

Cool.

I would like to see a program that detects when I lift my optical mouse up from the table (as if I was going to make a hi-sign), so that it then can generate a keyboard shortcut event for the "waving hi"-gesture that would be sent to SL. Anybody familiar with mouse programming...