Microsoft showed off a technology on Tuesday that could one day allow people to edit artifacts into video as easily as they do with digital photographs today.
The research technology, dubbed Unwrap Mosaic, was shown to do things such as adding a moustache and rosy cheeks onto a person in a video. It works by unwrapping a 3D object into a flat image that contains the whole object, in this case a face.
"What we've done is built a way of patterning the essence of a video in a single pattern," said Andrew Fitzgibbon, who presented the technology Tuesday at the Siggraph trade show in Los Angeles. "The key to that technique is that unwrapped or flattened image."
While there are plenty of techniques available for changing colours in a video or other special effects, adding a full moustache is tricky because although it exists in one place — the face — different parts of the face are visible at different times.
In the movies, it's done by using a model of the face. But Fitzgibbon's team was looking to create a single tool that would work on multiple types of 3D objects.
The technology is still just a research project. Microsoft has released some of the underlying technology into the public domain. Fitzgibbon also hopes to put a user interface on top of the technology and make it available somehow to the public, though he declined to say when that would be.
Fitzgibbon's paper is just one of several papers Microsoft is presenting at the show. Another is a follow-up to Microsoft'sPhotoSynth technology, which creates three-dimensional views of an attraction by using lots of still photographs. In the new paper, by the creators of PhotoSynth, Microsoft talks about how to navigate in a 3D environment constructed from such photos.
For example, the technology could be used to see what the Pantheon looks like from the outside, then zoom in to go through the door, walk down a hall, move up close to see a certain sculpture, turn around, and so on. Although this can be done with publicly available photos, for example from Flickr, Microsoft said users can also add personal photos to the mix.
Microsoft's Unwrap Mosaic technology lets artifacts be edited into video, in this case facial hair, by adding them to a flattened 3D image
