For creators like The Gregory Brothers, placing one mouth on top of another in a YouTube video is a common process. Now, thanks to a new piece of technology, that routine could soon become much simpler. A team of researchers from Stanford University, University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, and the Max Planck Institute for Informatics have published a paper that discusses Face2Face, a program that allows its users to capture their facial expressions with a webcam and transpose them onto the face of someone in a YouTube video — all in real time.
Face2Face is hard to describe with words, but the video introducing it is as clear as it is hard to believe. Check it out for yourself:
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As a consumer product, Face2Face would potentially have a vast number of uses for video creators. It would improve the quality and accuracy of dubbed videos on YouTube, open up the site’s creative community to new possibilities, and, more nefariously, assist trolls and con artists who want to whip up fake soundbites for famous people. If you already think you can’t trust anything you see on the Internet, just wait until Face2Face becomes public.
When will Face2Face arrive for a wider user base? The answer to that question isn’t clear. “Unfortunately, the software is currently not publicly available — it’s just a research project,” researcher Matthias Niessner told Mashable. “However, we are thinking about commercializing it given that we are getting so many requests.” For now, trolls will just have to be satisfied with misleading photoshops.
