Realtime Face Substitution Is Going To Make Chatroulette An Even More Dangerous Place

By Andrew Liszewski

I’m sure its popularity has dropped off, but there are still plenty of people who spend their free time on chat sites like Chatroulette. Even though we’re all aware of the dangers of randomly being connected to a stranger’s video feed. Besides frequent exposures, there’s also the risk of being connected to someone who’s not who they appear to be. And while you might think it would be easy to tell when someone’s using pre-recorded footage, this impressive system actually remaps someone’s face in realtime to look like someone else.

Now granted, in its current state it’s not perfect. But it’s already surprisingly convincing at times, particularly at how well it disguises Arturo Castro’s real face. According to his Vimeo page, the application demo’d in this video was created using “Kyle McDonald’s ofxFacetracker + Jason Saragih’s facetracker library” which is detailed and available upon request here. As to how to put the pieces together to start your random chat reign of terror? Well I’m afraid you’ll need to be a fairly capable developer to do that.

[ Vimeo – Arturo Castro – Faces ] VIA [ Fazed ]