Disney’s research arm has unveiled a new technology concept capable of live dynamic augmentation onto human faces.

Dubbed a ‘makeup lamp’, the concept uses projector-based illumination, which can alter the appearance of human performers during different performances.

“The key challenge of live augmentation is latency – an image is generated according to a specific pose, but is displayed on a different facial configuration by the time it is projected,” said the Disney Research publication. “Our system aims at reducing latency during every step of the process, from capture, through processing, to projection.”

The system uses infrared illumination and uses a high-speed camera detecting facial orientation and expression. When the system detects this, expression are mapped and generated onto the user’s face.

“In contrast to existing methods, the presented system is the first method which fully supports dynamic facial projection mapping without the requirement of any physical tracking markers and incorporates facial expressions,” said the paper.

“We believe that projection-based non-rigid expressive augmentation has the potential to give rise to a large variety of new creative application scenarios in the near future, and that the methods described are the fundamental building blocks toward its realisation.”

To read the full paper, click here.