Dudes: are you looking to get that Baywatch body without all the pumping of iron? All you need is a little "MovieReshape" and you can be virtually buff! Just don't let anyone see you in person. MovieReshape is a program created by Christian Theobalt at the Max Plank Institute in Germany. The program will digitally alter your appearance (including height, weight, and muscle tone) in any movie clip. Women can even get a digital boob job or liposuction to automatically enhance body size and shape on the fly. Earlier approaches to body manipulation on film required retouching of every frame, a very laborious process when you're talking about 30 frames per second. But this approach is different--it works from a 3D body plan made from the scans of 120 different men and women of different shapes and sizes, and in many different positions. Using off-the-shelf software the team then identifies the person to be manipulated, and tweaks parameters like height, waist girth, leg length, muscularity, and breast girth. Check out a video explanation (with some creepy demonstrations) after the jump: One use of this software is obviously to make actors' bodies even more unattainable--or to help them out, so they don't have to gain or loose weight for a role. New Scientist suggests an alternate use for the program:
It could also be a cost-saver for advertising companies. Because standards of beauty vary across cultures, it is the norm to shoot several adverts for a single product. With the new software, firms could make one film and tweak the model's dimensions to suit different countries.
The program isn't perfect yet: the person being manipulated needs to be free of other objects around them. Also, the greater the manipulation, the greater the distortion around the person is. The team screened reactions from 15 people and they said the distortion wasn't distracting, but judge for yourself in the video above. Related content: Discoblog: The OK Go Video: Playing With the Speed of Time
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Image: Jain, et.al(pdf), to be presented at SIGGRAPH ASIA 2010.
