Disney has unveiled new technology that could revolutionize live stage performances.

    A team at Disney Research has developed a projection system that can track the actor’s facial movements and change expressions so that the face is painted with light, rather than physical makeup.

    By adjusting illumination*, the system, called Makeup Lamps, can display any color or texture that an artist wants to achieve, which could include effects that make the actor appear older, or appear to grow facial hair or have clownish face paint, all in real time.

    “We’ve seen astounding advances in recent years in capturing facial performances of actors and transferring those expressions to virtual characters,” said Markus Gross, vice president at Disney Research.

    “Leveraging these technologies to augment* the appearance of live actors is the next step and could result in amazing transformations before our eyes of stage actors in theaters or other venues.”

    “The key challenge of live augmentation is latency — the time between generating an image that matches the actor’s pose and when the image is displayed,” said Anselm Grundhofer, principal research engineer at Disney Research. “The larger the latency, the more the actor’s pose will have changed and the greater the potential misalignment* between the augmentation and the face.”

    In designing Makeup Lamps, the team’s main objective was to reduce latency at each step of the process, which includes capture the facial pose to process to projection, Grundhofer explained.

    And the researchers figured out this was possibly achieved by limiting the complexity of the technology’s algorithms*.

    A coaxial* camera-projection was used for the setup, which is where the camera that detects facial movements shares the same optical axis as the projector that illuminates the face. This enabled the team to process images in two dimensions and still provide consistent augmentation of the face.(SD-Agencies)