“When the iPhone X first came out, everyone had fun using the device’s front-facing camera to make Animoji. But it turns out, the device’s facial capture abilities aren’t just good for making cartoon pigs sing,” Andrew Webster writes for The Verge. “They could also potentially be a powerful and inexpensive tool for game developers.”
“Finnish studio Next Games, which is currently working on a location-based augmented reality game called The Walking Dead: Our World, has built a tool that makes it possible to capture facial data using the iPhone X’s camera, and then use that data to animate a character in a game,” Webster writes. “During a demo of the technology, I watched Next creative director Mikael Achren use the iPhone X’s depth-sensing front camera to record some facial movements. He then tapped a button on-screen and transferred that information to an instance of the game engine Unity running on his laptop. Within seconds, the same facial expressions he had recorded were animating a version of Walking Dead character Daryl in the game engine.”
Webster writes, “While the iPhone X might not be as accurate as a full-blown facial capture rig, the results I saw were still impressive, and they were accomplished at a fraction of the cost.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: It will only get better!
“When we first tried iPhone X’s Animoji, we instantly thought, ‘Hey, they could bang out episodes of Thomas & Friends and Jay Jay the Jet Plane with this!'” — MacDailyNews, November 16, 2017
SEE ALSO:
VFX artist shows how iPhone X TrueDepth camera could be used for 3D animation – November 16, 2017
Why stop there. Why not have an Apple game console like Xbox.
Or is this too spinal tap like. You know…. “Gamers. They’re not really a big market”.