The FACIALMOCAP project has been selected in the 2022 call of the Ministerio de Ciencia e Inovación, through the CDTI, and which finances R&D projects in audiovisual technologies and video games with #NextGenerationEU funds. The project aims to develop a new 3D system for the capture of facial movements in the audiovisual industry that represents an advance on current systems.

In the audiovisual industry and also in video games, it is increasingly necessary to recreate the movement of people to apply them to animated characters in a realistic way. The most important challenge in this field is the recreation of facial movement, since the face is the most recognizable part of the body and conveys the most information and expression. Today’s industry has special helmets that incorporate several sensors to record facial movements in detail, often using marked reference points. They are techniques that offer satisfactory results of precision and realism, but which involve an increase in complexity, time and cost.

Recently, less expensive and invasive alternatives have appeared in the scene, which do not require facial markers and which use artificial intelligence to automatically detect representative points of facial expression. These are fledgling systems that have not yet reached the level of quality offered by marker systems.

The FACIALMOCAP project will provide a valuable solution that will improve animation tasks in the capture of facial movements. It will offer a new facial movement capture system as a software product for the business models of providing animation, rendering, rigging and 3D graphic design services.