BETA
This is a BETA experience. You may opt-out by clicking here

More From Forbes

Edit Story

Epic’s iOS App Captures Facial Animations In Real-Time For Unreal Engine

Following
This article is more than 3 years old.

The company behind Unreal Engine and popular battle royale game Fortnite, has created a new motion capture app for iOS called Live Link Face. The new app, by Epic Games, is designed to let developers record facial expressions from their iPhone and map them directly onto characters in Unreal Engine in real-time. The result is high-quality facial animations that are claimed to be “production-ready.”

Currently available in the App Store, Live Link Face accomplishes this feat by leveraging Apple’s augmented reality platform, ARKit, and the iPhone’s TrueDepth front-facing camera. With these two technologies working together, the app is able to track a person’s facial features and movement and transmit the data to Unreal Engine through Live Link over a network.

If this sounds somewhat familiar, it’s because you’ve likely used these tools yourself at one point or another. Apple’s Animoji and Memoji use the same technology to map your face, head and neck movements onto your virtual cartoon avatar. Snapchat and Instagram also make use of these tools to enhance their AR filters on the iPhone.

Live Link Face was developed to “excel on both professional capture stages with multiple actors in full motion capture suits as well as at a single artist’s desk,” according to the company’s official post. Epic goes on to say, “the app delivers expressive and emotive facial performances in any production situation.”

The announcement of this app comes only a couple months after the reveal of Unreal Engine 5. In Epic’s blog post, you can see a performer’s expressions mirrored on the character that was used for Unreal Engine 5’s tech demo Lumen in the Land of Nanite. It is currently unknown if Epic has any plans to bring the app to Android phones.

Follow me on Twitter or LinkedInCheck out my website or some of my other work here