<http://schema.org/articleBody>
" One moment he&amp;#039;s Paris Hilton. The next he&amp;#039;s Steve Jobs. Then Marilyn Monroe, Mao Zedong, and any number of other famous faces. Fittingly, Faces is the name of the impressive, and slightly creepy, facial-projection technology that Arturo Castro built, and that recently became a Web sensation. After seeing the video of Castro getting an early start on Halloween by digitally morphing from one celebrity to another celebrity, we had to know how it works. Barcelona artist and developer Castro, 36, helps develop and maintain an open-source toolkit for creative coding called openFrameworks. He says he first became interested in creating Faces after seeing an online example for image cloning by Canadian programmer Kevin Atkinson. &amp;quot;Some people in the openFrameworks community have also been doing recent work using face tracking,&amp;quot; he says, &amp;quot;so I tried to mix the two and see what happened.&amp;quot;  Faces relies on research scientist Jason Saragih&amp;#039;s C/C++ library for face tracking and an add-on called ofxFaceTracker that artist Kyle McDonald, 25, created for openFrameworks to simplify the facial-recognition process. When Castro feeds an image of a face into his program, McDonald&amp;#039;s add-on analyzes the image and marks it with dozens of points, determining the positions of the subject&amp;#039;s eyes, nose, and mouth in relation to its length and width. Castro then extracts the mesh from the photo and superimposes it onto a real-time video (in this case, of himself), so that when the person in the video squints, smiles, or even raises his or her eyebrows, the overlay stretches, shrinks, and moves along with the person.  To reduce tonal discrepancies between the actual person&amp;#039;s skin and the &amp;quot;mask,&amp;quot; Castro applies color interpolation algorithms from Atkinson&amp;#039;s image clone code, which produces an eerie blending effect easily visible on screen. After a bit more tooling, Castro and McDonald plan to publish the code so others can actually study how it works and add their own images and effects. This first version definitely made an impression. &amp;quot;One of the first things people say is that it&amp;#039;s kind of scary,&amp;quot; Castro explains, &amp;quot;because the faces are a bit stiff and move unnaturally. In general, they almost feel dead.&amp;quot; These responses have led Castro and McDonald to ponder their own agenda and motives. &amp;quot;Maybe we&amp;#039;re hovering around the uncanny valley,&amp;quot; says Castro\u2014referring to the idea that when human replicas look and act almost but not quite human, the people watching them become repulsed. &amp;quot;But it&amp;#039;s the space we&amp;#039;re most interested in exploring right now. In a way, we have the opportunity to reflect on our fear of a dystopian society, a place where no one is who they seem to be or in which real human interaction is replaced by these stiff masks.&amp;quot;  Now, Castro and McDonald are exploring other face-substitution tech, including taking a face from one video and meshing it onto another. And by learning to better correct for lighting and skin deformation, Castro says Faces could soon move past the uncanny valley and into a place where the software can create images that look naturally human. Indeed, researchers like Harvard&amp;#039;s Kevin Dale are already doing it.  Beyond demonstrating what&amp;#039;s possible, Castro says he also hopes his projects will get people thinking about the inherent dangers of a society in which the line between truth and reality is increasingly less clear. &amp;quot;Hopefully the sooner we see this technique in public hands, the more critical we&amp;#039;ll become of the technology,&amp;quot; says Castro, &amp;quot;and also the more skeptical we&amp;#039;ll become of digital images. It&amp;#039;s good to start thinking about these things, because the most cutting-edge academic research already has non-real-time results that are indistinguishable from real video.&amp;quot; "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/how-to/a7305/how-it-works-the-digital-mask-that-lets-you-become-anyone/>