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Comment by crazygringo | Hacker News Reader

This is like creating a live version of author drawings, e.g. of New Yorker contributors:

https://www.newyorker.com/contributors

How interesting would it be to have your own live emotionally expressive avatar for videoconferencing, when you don't want to worry about your hair, makeup, lighting, or general visual state at all?

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David Foster Wallace ruminated on this in Infinite Jest.

"The proposed solution to what the telecommunications industry's psychological consultants termed Video-Physiognmoic Dsyphoria (or VPD) was, of course, the advent of High-Definition Masking. Mask-wise, the initial option of High-Definition Photographic Imaging — i.e. taking the most flattering elements of a variety of flattering multi-angle photos of a given phone-consumer and‚ thanks to existing image-configuration equipment already pioneered by the cosmetics and law-enforcement industries — combining them into a wildly attractive high-def broadcastable composite of a face wearing an earnest, slightly overintense expression of complete attention."

Always thought it was fascinating that he came up with this in 1996!

"You can look like a gorilla or a dragon or a giant talking penis in the Metaverse. Spend five minutes walking down the Street and you will see all of these. Hiro's avatar just looks like Hiro, with the difference that no matter what Hiro is wearing in Reality, his avatar always wears a black leather kimono. Most hacker types don't go in for garish avatars, because they know that it takes a lot more sophistication to render a realistic human face than a talking penis. Kind of the way people who really know clothing can appreciate the fine details that separate a cheap gray wool suit from an expensive hand-tailored gray wool suit.", Neil Stephenson, Snowcrash, 1992.

You can do that with some premade and custom models via https://facerig.com/ already. They're not perfect, but they aree pretty expressive.

IOS has the animated animal characters that mimic gestures pretty well.

I was playing with OpenFrameworks and Kinect years ago, and you could pretty much do this, so I am curious why you would TF.js instead of simple OpenCV or other libraries that don't need to to use ML or DL. Or am I mistaken, and it is using simple bits of TS.js?

We had a large, flip-disc (or dot) wall at the site in Macau in 2012 that we purchased from a company that was a wall of black and white discs or dots that would flip to create a cool effect by tracking people in front of the wall with Kinect units in real time. It also made a cool clicky sound like old train/airport physical arrival/departure boards did.

I had a feature on my HTC phone or early Skype over 10 years ago where a cartoon cat mimicked my mouth, eyes, and head movement live on camera, which I can't find the reference to, but I have a screen recording of it when talking with my kids in the US from Macau.

I also remember using animata, a software that animated 2D puppet-like cut-outs to the music, I played with over 7 years or so ago, that was really cool [1 YouTube].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dz8OMxB8m_M

Re the feature in HTC or Skype, it was Skype, there were a set of novelty faces that mimicked the movement (I can only remember the dog, but there were a few, some more effective than others).

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