Last year, Facebook bought the Oculus Rift technology, one of the most promising in the field of virtual reality. As Mark Zuckerberg himself, head of the social network, has stated, the goal is to improve the quality of our long-distance interactions.
And that is precisely what the researchers at the University of Southern California and the Oculus division in Facebook intend with the innovation they have just presented: an addition for the virtual reality headset to create a virtual clone of our face. The system consists of a 3D camera that records the movements of the lips and a set of extensiometers that capture the expression of the upper part of the face.
The software then combines the data and the avatar acquires the user's gestures in real time, increasing the sense of reality. At the moment, the researchers have developed a prototype, but they do not rule out that it may be commercialized in the near future. One of the improvements they want to incorporate is to eliminate muscle "warm-up", because now the system requires the first-time user to gesticulate exaggeratedly for about 20 seconds to capture its expressiveness.
