Augmented reality mirror changes your face on the fly-Video-NSMag

The following information is used for educational purposes only.






Just like the classic hall of mirrors at a fairground, an augmented reality "mirror" lets you change the way you look by subtly altering your features.

Created by Vlado Kitanovski and Ebroul Izquierdo of the Multimedia and Vision research group at Queen Mary, University of London, the mirror - actually just a webcam hooked up to a PC running custom software - morphs an individual's facial features to give them a new look.

Other augmented reality applications can suffer from jittering images as the software struggles to overlay virtual objects on to real-world video, but Kitanovski's mirror is much smoother because his software doesn't actually add anything synthetic. Instead, it creates a 3D model of the user's face that tracks features such as the mouth or nose and warps the video to make them larger or smaller.

It's a fun effect, but Kitanovski also hopes the mirror could have a more serious application as visualisation tool for plastic surgery. "Another application I'm considering is utilising texture-based facial modifications, for example, applying virtual makeup so that women can experiment with the appearance of different lipsticks or eye-shadows in real-time on their PC," he says.

He would also like create a smartphone app, though today's phones don't have enough processing power to run the software in its current state, and will present the work next month at the International Conference on Image Processing in Brussels, Belgium.