The Michael Jackson Continuum

Here's what happens if you take three single images of Michael Jackson - one as a kid (probably some time around "Rockin' Robin"), one during his "Thriller" period, and one when he was doing odd stuff on balconies – turn each one into a FaceGen head, and then use the program's ageing and tweening settings to generate a set of intermediate heads.

The three original heads are top left, centre, and bottom right. The rest are tweened and age-tweeked extrapolations, courtesy of FaceGen.

You should be able to get much better results than this with a more representative set of photos. A more useful source picture taken between the "Jackson Five" years and "Thriller", would have been handy, but the otherwise-usable ones that I turned up on the net all seemed to be in monochrome. :(

"Bottom left" is what FaceGen extrapolates for Michael Jackson as a fifty-something-yearold with no plastic surgery, top right runs the process in reverse, working backwards from the last picture. The rest are intermediates.

Summer Glau

Here's an odd thing. I added a "Summer Glau" head to the collection at relativitybook.com, and it struck me ... if anyone runs this software, their PC will be pretending to be an actress, who is pretending to be a robot, which is pretending to be a human.

You know that you've reached a certain level of technology when things start to get this complicated ...

Computer-generated 3D faces, FaceBank, FaceGen

I initially added the FaceGen page to the relativitybook.com website as a bit of fun, but it's quickly become the most popular page on the website. It seems that - strangely enough - a lot of people out there find Angelina Jolie to be rather more interesting than gravitomagnetic field theory.

So I've spent some time adding more sample 3D faces. There are now more than fifty of them, and I've put up a separate "face bank" page for browsing them, http://www.relativitybook.com/CoolStuff/facebank.html . There's also some jerky video on the ErkDemon YouTube channel.

Some of the sharper-eyed visitors will have noticed that apart from Albert Einstein and Barack Obama, all the faces are female. Personal preference. I suppose that I really ought to grudgingly do a few more male faces at some point, just to make thing look more balanced. One or two. Maybe.

If anyone wants to leave any feedback or comments, you can do it here, on this blog page.

Now, see if you can work out which slider to move to make Barack Obama's ears waggle ...