EyeToy PS2 Camera To Use Digimask For 3D Faces

Thanks to Gamesindustry.biz for its article indicating that Sony has teamed up with Digimask to allow full 3D models of gamers' faces to be used in PS2 titles, providing the player has an EyeToy USB camera. The Digimask technology "allows gamers to take a couple of snaps of their own head with EyeToy and have them magically remodelled into a fully animated 3D head", and a number of unannounced games are in development using this technology, which might allow "...players to put their own face onto a player in a football game, or to [theoretically] fight against digital reproductions of their friends in online games of SOCOM." GI.Biz does, however, note: "Of course, there is the eternal concern that mischievous gamers will take pictures of, well, other body parts, giving the 'Personal Head Creation' technology a bad name."

Figures...

[hookedup]

"Of course, there is the eternal concern that mischievous gamers will take pictures of, well, other body parts, giving the 'Personal Head Creation' technology a bad name."

I can just see the discussion in game "Hey Jon, how come your smile is sideways....OH DEAR LORD"

Screenshots?

[jtheory]

No demo screenshots in the article... which is really too bad, because it would make an IDEAL Farq PhotoShopping candidate.

Personal Head

[rogabean]

"Of course, there is the eternal concern that mischievous gamers will take pictures of, well, other body parts, giving the 'Personal Head Creation' technology a bad name."
Gamers doing this? I don't believe it!
Give the "Personal Head Creation" a bad name? Obviously they didn't think too hard about the name they gave it did they?

Won't somebody think of the media?

[Txiasaeia]

Methinks this isn't going to be regarded too highly in the press. "Now you can scan your head and your friend's head into the game and kill each other!" "They're encouraging murder because they're killing virtual representations of their best friends!" Etc. etc.

As for the "mischevious gamers," I don't even *want* to think of what kinda "heads" they would appropriate in a game of SOCOM!

Re:Won't somebody think of the media?

[HTH NE1]

As for the "mischevious gamers," I don't even *want* to think of what kinda "heads" they would appropriate in a game of SOCOM!

Are you sure you wouldn't want to play as Chairface Chippendale [internationalhero.co.uk]?

Perfect Dark

[StocDred]

Perfeck Dark for N64 was supposed to include this sort of thing using the Game Boy Camera... but it was removed at the last minute. The official reason was that it affected performance of the game, but it was so close to Columbine that many figured that was why Nintendo had the feature stripped.

Obviously enough time has passed that companies aren't afraid to include "shoot your friends' digitized faces!" as a packaging bullet point.

Concern??

[Itsik]

Why is it that corporations always try and "shield" our lives from what they deem inappropriate.
When you teach someone to use a hammer. That person can use it for what it was intended or he or she can bang someone's head open. That doesn't mean that we should not make hammers.

Re:Concern??

[hambonewilkins]

But if that "hammer" is only designed and used to break open people's heads, then yes, we should be concerned.
There are certain "hammers" that do not have other uses except for killing.

Re:Concern??

[hambonewilkins]

No, actually, it would be pretty hard to use a video game to directly kill someone (bludgeoning?)

Re:Concern??

[bigman2003]

Do you really think they give a flying fuck about shielding us?

They don't want bad press- protests, or worst- Wal*Mart not carrying their game because it is inappropriate.

The *really* don't care about the social impact. If you are concerned about the social impact, you probably are not running a *successful* business.

(Yes, of course there are examples of morally correct successful businesses, and many of them are successful because being morally correct is their schtick...money from granolas is just as

Re:Concern??

[Itsik]

Notice that I put shield in quotes. Trust me I'm not that naive. I know what makes them tick. The reason I used the term shield is because some companies and even societies "moral" claims. That's all.
I do agree with you, that in reality they don't care about the social impact.

Re:Concern??

[MMaestro]

Corporations don't give a rat's ass when it comes to "shielding" our lives. Its the public opinion that they care about.

If id Software sold Quake with the subtitle called "Kill All Freaks" and it made trillions of dollars, do you really think they'd care that you, Joe Average, complained about the terminlogy? Hell no, they tell you to fuck off. If you're the CEO of, say, EA Games; would you publish a WWII FPS sim called 'The Battle of Stalinrad' or 'The Slaughter of Russians at Stalinrad'?

As for the hamme

Re:Concern??

[dakryx]

They're not trying to shield anyone if anything its their bottom line, money. All it takes is a parent group to decide to boycott and its all over news the bad press isn't worth it.

Re:Concern??

[Itsik]

Please note my response to bigman2003

Protect the children!

[jmlyle]

You know, putting the head of an underaged person on a Lara Croft-type character body could probably get you throw in jail.

Re:Protect the children!

[Carnildo]

Nope. In a Supreme Court decision a few years back, it was ruled that digital representations of minors could not be classified as child pornography, since no real minors were involved.

Re:Protect the children!

[eliza_effect]

I'm pretty sure it's exactly the opposite..

Distraction

[aridhol]

"Who was that ugly-ass man?"

"I don't know. His nick was 'goatse', though"

Re:Football?

[simoniker]

Heh, unless I'm taking the troll bait, GamesIndustry.biz in based in England, and so they actually mean soccer when they say football. Those silly Englishers - doh!

American Football?

[ayahner]

No, no no...
You don't understand.
Americans invented football!
Europeans got confused by the title when trying to play, and accidentally created a sport like football, but you use your feet almost exclusively.
Americans correctly called this sport "Socker" which, when bare-feet was deemed a politically incorrect way to play the sport, became, "Soccer"
Also on the "created by Americans" list:

• INXS
• Sushi
• Chess
• Shakespeare
• War

Although we can argue about the whole chess thing...

Re:American Football?

[bigman2003]

Sushi- yes, I can see how we probably invented that.

War- hell, nobody does it better, so we were probably the first.

INXS- the guy was banging some hot chicks before he was killed in that mob hit, so probably they were really Americans. (That was when being Australian was cool- so it was all a sham...and that whole 'hung himself' thing...lies...why would you kill yourself when you can bang hot chicks?)

Chess - Dunno about that one, probably invented by the Ruskies, or those sneaky Asians. *SOMEBODY* was

Re:I wonder...

[StocDred]

At one time, having two analog sticks on your controller was a gimmick in gaming. So were rumble effects. Sometimes gimmicks pay off, and sometimes they don't.

The games that came with the EyeToy are a serviceable party game, and it's the kind of thing that attracts the interest of people outside the gaming world because it's moderately fun and cutsey. It's nice to see that Sony is trying to get other games to use the camera, so that it doesn't end up ignored. I'm sure there's more uses cooking than just s

Re:I wonder...

[RegalBegal]

who said i full study? Granted he isn't on some gaming board but he is the guy on the stree so to speak. He sees what goes on every day with the average gamer.

Yeah analog sticks and rumble packs were "gimmicks" but they enhanced game play. Not some cheesey aesthetic like the dude face i'm mud stomping at 3AM in SOCOM.

Sony ISN'T doing well, they are looking for the next big thing to grab onto instead of innovating like they did in the 90s.

You're going to find EyeToy and the game its packaged with on shelv

Re:I wonder...

[Aelfy]

The EyeToy has already sold *millions* of units here in the EU, and the unit itself has been in the top ten selling games in the UK for 29 consecutive weeks. (http://www.elspa.com/about/charts/charts.asp?d=2 0 040117&chartType=17)

They don't need you to buy it, the EyeToy is a hugely successful peripheral aimed squarely at the mainstream market.

Support for this system in games adds value to those games for those who already own an EyeToy unit, regardless of whether they like that genre or have ever hea

Re:I wonder...

[RegalBegal]

There could be Volumes written on what does swimmingly well in Japan and Europe but does poorly here. David Hasselhoff and the Yugo come to mind :)

I own XBox and I want...

[quinkin]

I own XBox and I want one of the damn things...

Gimmick schimmick. Playing tennis against your mates, facing the aliens with your little brother, videos of YOU getting air of the halfpipe at Mt Bulla, MMORPG's where you can actually create yourself (or your cat, dog, potplant, genitalia - as other posters have noted...).

Personally, I think the head of my two year old boy would be perfect in wrestling games...

Q.

image recognition put to good use?

[BeatdownGeek]

They could use the same image recognition stuff that PhotoShop uses to recognize currency, and modify it to recognize other... Er, heads.

Re:image recognition put to good use?

[Cyberop5]

photoshop's currency detection relies on characteristics of the bill to recognize it as a bill. I believe its the small diamonds in the background that give it away. Either way, there is some constant in each bill that it recognizes.

Finding a universal constant in, umm, heads would be a disgustingly daunting task.

Virtual Light - Machinama?

[stoolpigeon]

First thing this made me think of is when the guy in Gibson's "Virtual Light" pisses off the hacker kids and they put his face on a guy in a nasty S&M kind of porno thing. That was a kind of out there idea in the '80s but it is getting more and more possible.

I would think the real kick in this would have less to do with getting your own face in a game and more to do with getting someone you don't like in a game. The machinama possibilities could be very, very interesting

DOOM and Bill Gates, LEGAL question ...?

[justanyone]

Hey - does this mean I can model Bill Gates' head onto the shoulders of all the monsters that I kill in Doom and Duke Nukem and all those First Person Shooter games?

I'm sure there's lots of people that would love to customize Doom and the other shooter games to add a picture of Newt Gingrich, Rush Limbaugh (the alleged "big fat idiot deaf crackfiend" as I've heard various political 'extremists' call him), and other politicos.

Likewise, this applies to Leisure Suit Larry and Grand Theft Auto - putting specific faces on the people in the games. This could get legally complicated, couldn't it...?

I mean, since Cindy Crawford techically owns almost all of the images of her. Or, her photographers do. So, hypothetically, if I take a set of random headshots (prove which photographer took them!) grab data from it, encode it to become the prostitute character for Grand Theft Auto, then sell the product of this work as a derivative work, is it covered under copyright law as a derivative work, or have I stolen the likeness from the photographers?

Re:DOOM and Bill Gates, LEGAL question ...?

[mobby_6kl]

You mean something like this? Osama model for ut2003 [ut2003hq.com] (theres a screenshot on that page)

Re:DOOM and Bill Gates, LEGAL question ...?

[cybergrue]

Hey - does this mean I can model Bill Gates' head onto the shoulders of all the monsters that I kill in Doom and Duke Nukem and all those First Person Shooter games?
People have been doing this for as long as there were mods. One of the first replaced all the monsters in Doom with Barney the purple dinosour.

The concern about "body parts" is understandable

[BigJimSlade]

While I don't have a specific reference nearby, an arcade game in the 80's did something similar with a camera for a high-score board. I'm pretty sure a number of players with the initials 'ASS' caused the demise of this product.

You know the old saying: Those who don't learn from history will do nothing butt repeat it.

<rimshot />

Two Heads

[Zevets]

Finally, I can have two different big headed characters!

Non-human "faces"

[J_DarkElf]

Who's to say people will stop with humans? One could easily take a pic of their cat or dog and use that as an avatar...

And we'll see the furries on the PS2 as well.