Friday, October 24, 2014

NBA 2K15 and Face Scan Technology

The new iteration of the NBA 2K series just came out, and although it's mostly the same as every other version of the game (except better graphics), one new feature they added this year is the ability to scan your face into the game using the Xbox One Kinect or Playstation 4 motion sensor. This way, when you play through the game as your own personal character, you can actually look like a video game version of yourself, which is simultaneously incredibly creepy and really cool. This has been done in video games before; I can remember in other sports games the game would use a camera connected to the system to take a picture and create an in-game model similar to your real life appearance. However, the result always looked horrible. Nowadays, video game characters look alarmingly realistic, and the motion sensing technology of things like the Kinect make face scanning pretty simple:


Of course, this is the 2K sponsored YouTube video promoting the technology, so of course it's gonna work flawlessly in this video. Still the scanning looks pretty realistic, which is scary considering this kind of technology is only going to get better and better.

Still, the face scanning is nowhere near perfect, as illustrated by this fairly hilarious video:


My god that's terrifying. So the potential for face scanning is not quite reached yet, but it's getting there. This made me imagine a future where you can put yourself in almost any video game, which is pretty cool to me. I'd definitely like to run around in Call of Duty or Battlefield as myself killing terrorists and whatnot, but that's just me.

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