2017 will be remembered as the year in which the wall between real and fake video began to crumble. Thanks to neural networks, we can synthesize fake humans from a few frames of video or get any person to say whatever we want. And now, it’s possible to turn any still photo of a person’s face into a moving, expressive video that can be controlled by another person. It’s just like the iPhone X’s animojis–but using a human face instead of a 3D animal. Watch the incredible video below:
Previous facial animation software required video of the target face to capture enough frames to show different expressions and emotions in the resulting synthetic video. But this new algorithm–presented at Siggraph Asia 2017–completely bypasses the need for a video source and works strictly from one single still photo of the target face.
But there’s one possible use of their tech that may come to your desktop or smartphone sooner than you’d think: The researchers’ demo video shows how they can implement a reactive profile photo on your Facebook wall–which can be animated dynamically in real-time according to people’s reactions to your posts. If someone is visiting your wall and reacts “angry” to one of your wall posts, your photo will animate to make an angry face that you never made. If it’s a happy reaction, your avatar will smile and so on. You can see how this works in this video capture:
It’s reasonable to imagine that Facebook would like to incorporate such a fun feature into its platform as soon as possible. But even if that doesn’t happen, you can be sure we’ll see it elsewhere soon. Hadar added that while they “don’t plan to make the software publicly available in the near future, [they] published all the algorithmic details in [their] research paper.”
Less fun are the possible unintentional uses of this technology–like anyone being able to trigger World War III by sending Donald Trump a video of Kim Jong-Un telling him what he thinks of his fake hair.