Awesome Faces

Engineers from Microsoft Research Asia are showing off VASA-1 an AI technology that can take a single photo and text input and produces a photorealistic talking head animation. Controls allow the user to adjust things like emotion, gaze direction, and head size. The intent is to generate lifelike virtual avatars, and not for impersonating real people.

We’ve all thought we saw faces in places they shouldn’t be, like buildings, outlets, and wood grain patterns. Duncan Clarke explores pareidolia, the tendency for humans to perceive faces and familiar forms where they don’t exist. Along the way, you’ll learn about other ways our brains really want us to see faces.

Gav and Dan, aka The Slow Mo Guys, wanted to see how G-forces affect a human face. Since they didn’t have a fighter jet or a centrifuge lying around, they did the next best thing. Dan jumped on a trampoline while holding a pricey high-speed camera. The expressions on Dan’s face in mid-flight are priceless.

58Products‘ playful porcelain pieces bring a smile to faces with their silly and expressive characters straight out of a Disney cartoon. They come in various shapes and sizes, including bowls, cups, mugs, sugar bowls, and storage jars.

Unity is one of the most powerful graphics and gaming engines out there, and it keeps getting better. Led by Creative Director Veselin Efremov, the Unity Demo Team put together Enemies, a short film that shows off Unity’s HD render pipeline, adaptive probe volume lighting, strand-based hair, and lifelike digital human capabilities.

Welcome house guests by inviting them to stop their dirty shoes on a face of your choosing. While you could put your own grinning mug on there, you could also go for someone you really dislike. Printed on a machine-washable mat with a non-slip rubber backing.

Epic Games is showing off an amazing computer graphics tool that connects to the cloud to create synthetic humans in minutes, rather than days or weeks. The models it creates are incredibly detailed and realistic and can be immediately exported for use in Unreal Engine. Check out two sample MetaHumans here.

There’s an entire subreddit dedicated to Pareidolia – the idea that we tend to see faces in inanimate objects because it’s human nature to look for other living creatures. This amusing promo clip for VICELAND’s Weed Week 2018 goes one step further, and makes the faces sing.