Tags: nightmarefuel

April 20, 2013 7:40 PM

Face Stealer App Will Steal Your Ability to Sleep

Yahoo! Japan’s FaceStealer app lets you load up images of other people, animals or cartoon characters, and then map them over your face.

posted by Room 641-A (19 comments total)

This is my surprised face.

Or is it?
posted by mazola at 7:46 PM on April 20, 2013 [18 favorites]

And it's free! (for now)
posted by ColdChef at 7:53 PM on April 20, 2013

Like I told you. What I said.
posted by hal9k at 7:59 PM on April 20, 2013

Seems like a rip-off of Kyle McDonald and Arturo Castro's Face Substitution work from more than a year back: Face Substitution on Vimeo.
posted by AtDuskGreg at 8:03 PM on April 20, 2013 [2 favorites]

Next Skype call from the in-laws will be George Jetson answering.
posted by hal9k at 8:04 PM on April 20, 2013

My first attempt.
posted by ColdChef at 8:05 PM on April 20, 2013 [29 favorites]

John Travolta and Nicolas Cage could have a blast with this.
posted by mazola at 8:06 PM on April 20, 2013 [1 favorite]

ColdChef: "My first attempt."

Absolutely hilarious!
posted by InsertNiftyNameHere at 8:26 PM on April 20, 2013

Cc, that is nightmare fuel indeed.
posted by arcticseal at 9:16 PM on April 20, 2013

Did somebody say nightmare fuel?
posted by eyeballkid at 9:56 PM on April 20, 2013 [2 favorites]

AtDuskGreg: which were just OpenFrameworks wrappers around the actual detection algorithm, as far as I'm aware - I don't think anyone's claiming to have come up with the original system, which I'm pretty sure was linked to from here, and I'd provide myself if I wasn't pecking at a smartphone screen.

Edit: it's liked from Kyle's Vimeo video there, but has a mac.com address. The OF examples won't compile without this code, which the author had not distributed under an open license, as far as I'm aware.
posted by davemee at 12:49 AM on April 21, 2013

I just mapped a photo of the pizza I just had delivered. Pizza face!
posted by panaceanot at 3:44 AM on April 21, 2013 [1 favorite]

This lacks only Lemmy.
posted by Smedleyman at 8:10 AM on April 21, 2013

Quick, somebody map their own face onto their face.
posted by cortex at 10:04 AM on April 21, 2013 [1 favorite]

davemee: McDonald and Castro's Face Substitution used FaceTracker, a library by the researcher Jason Saragih that implements deformable model fitting for face tracking. However, FaceTracker does not provide the face copying and blending technique used in Face Substitution to combine the faces (called Fast Image Cloning which McDonald also implemented based on this SIGGRAPH paper). And, of course, FaceTracker does not provide the aesthetic idea of substituting faces, which Yahoo! app copies exactly from Face Substitution.

In the process of their work on Face Subsitution, McDonald made a wrapper for FaceTracker for the creative coding toolkit OpenFrameworks, yes (called ofxFaceTracker). McDonald also convinced Saragih to open source the work and is now the official maintainer of the library: kylemcdonald/FaceTracker (linked directly as such from Saragih's site). That work lead to a profusion of face tracking projects of varying levels of originality and interest.

This trend of advertising firms and big companies ripping of creative artists is widespread. Golan Levin gave a great presentation on the topic here: New Media Artists are the Unpaid Research Division of Ad Agencies.
posted by AtDuskGreg at 10:10 AM on April 21, 2013 [3 favorites]

I'm pretty sure there's a Shinto or traditional Japanese myth about an oni that goes around stealing faces.

At the very least, I read about it in Iron Man.
posted by Apocryphon at 12:10 PM on April 21, 2013

Clutch Cargo meets Cthulhu. The lucky ones will download first.
posted by maudlin at 4:49 PM on April 21, 2013

Looks like Yahoo! is in for a turnaround under Marissa Meyer.
posted by pashdown at 5:06 PM on April 21, 2013

In the same way that Egypt did under the Black Pharaoh, yes.
posted by Apocryphon at 5:10 PM on April 22, 2013