You could be a character in future MMO games

Ever wanted to see yourself in your favorite online game? Your wish may come true sooner than later. BigStage and Funcom are teaming up to produce an online (and eventually in-game) feature that lets you put your mug into Age of Conan. Now I don’t play Age of Conan but if this feature takes off it could spread to other MMO’s like WOW or Lord of the Rings Online (the game I play). As it stands right now, the extent of the technology is a bit limited. You can only paste your face into cut scenes and still images. Here’s how it works: you head over to BigStage, upload three photos of yourself (one looking head on, another slightly turned to the side, another even more slightly turned to the side) then your face will be magically grafted onto the body of an Age of Conan character. Once that’s done, you can add accessories like an eye patch or shades, change the expression on your face from blah to surly to angry to surprised and beyond, and share your picture via email or on Facebook / MySpace /etc. More interestingly, the face you generate transfers to cut scenes, and does it pretty well too – the jaw and facial movements don’t look too fake, based on this video evidence. Of course, this isn’t much more than a novelty right now. But BigStage promises that we’ll be seeing this kind of stuff “in-game soon. So Age of Conan may be populated with regular people faces soon enough. Or it could be populated with countless Britney Spears and Russell Crow clones, I wonder how copy rights will play into this? Till next time I emerge from the murky depths of the interwebs happy surfing.

 

Sharkey