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Every time I have tried and failed to scan my face into a sports video game, I've gotten 500 tweets and comments about what I was doing wrong: Not enough light. The background was too busy. I didn't fill the camera with my face. I'm so ugly I was automatically moderated by the app's objectionable-content heuristics algorithm. Blah blah blah.
OK, fine. Here's a solution, from San Jose-based ItSeez3D, that completely wipes out all of those excuses. I tried it at GDC 2017, and any video game thinking about offering this kind of customization option should use it, because all it needs to build a 3D model of the head is a standard selfie.
That's it. No "hold your head for this long," no "turn slowly as the camera scans your mug" and you come out looking like Deebo from Friday.
At the ItSeez3D booth at GDC last week, all it took was a selfie, shot on a standard iPad, and zap, we got this. Looks good to me!
The angle of the shot, the background and the lighting didn't matter. ItSeez3D's app, working through an enormous database of mugshots in the cloud, interpreted my face and built a 3D model in less time than the face scanning apps I've used for the likes of NBA Live and NBA 2K.
ItSeez3D's ancestor was Itseez, Inc. which developed computer vision algorithms that some may recognize as OpenCV, which has numerous industrial applications ranging from advanced robotics to mines inspection. Intel bought Itseez last year and then Itseez3D, headquartered in Silicon Valley with R&D in Russia, was spun off, and developed this face scan solution off what its engineers had already learned.
Video gaming is probably the simplest and most obvious application for ItSeez3D's technology, but Victor Erukhimov, the lab's chief executive, told me that it can also be used to create avatars for conferencing inside a virtual reality space. Intel scarfed up Itseez for its Internet of Things Group to work on projects like self-driving cars, digital security and surveillance, and industrial inspection, so there’s a lot for ItSeez3D to work with, too.
For years, video games have had a devil of a time giving people understandable tools to create themselves (we've built, like, an entire franchise spoofing this) or scan themselves into a game.
ItSeez3D says they can build an app for a games maker, or license their technology over to someone who wants to use it.
Either way, this technology, delivered through a mobile device application, suggests to me that sports games can finally turn scanning yourself in from a nice-to-have-novelty into a baseline expectation of their career modes.
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