Aliens, Robots, Cheetahs, Oh My! Watch These “Face Hackers” Use Projectors To Modify Their Faces In Real Time

Happy Sunday! Ready to have your mind blown?

By mixing ultra-bright projectors and advanced facial tracking with some damned fine visual design, these guys are able to use their faces as a canvas some truly wild work.

Watch on as they morph from human, to alien, to cheetah, to robot overlord on the fly.

So how does it work? To oversimplify it: an array of cameras tracks the dots on their faces, akin to the way Hollywood motion capture systems work. They then take some truly amazing texture/animation work and digitally morph it around a model of each guy’s face — essentially making a mask of light — and project it onto their skin in real time.

This is actually the second time this group — OMOTE, an artist collective out of Japan — has pulled off something along these lines. While this latest video kicks it up a notch over that first one (if only because they’re “hacking” two faces, instead of one), the first one is still absolutely worth watching:

With a bit more (totally hard and not at-all-trivial) work, it’s easy to imagine a system like this being used in live entertainment. Imagine a deadmau5/daft punk style EDM artist who uses this to morph his “mask” in real time, perhaps based on the song being played. Uhng.