Second Life’s first fully automated face transplant service

Neuron Bandit investigates this pioneering project into avatar customisation
Cyberextruder's 'AutoFace service' is a fully automated sl /website based service, allowing the customer to upload a facial image for transplant onto their avatar.
This digital cosmetic service does exactly what is advertised. It stamps the features from your photo on to your avatar and cleverly positions the eyes, mouth and nose to the correct facial geometry. This process requires some image preparation which is described in detail at their store and webpage (accessed from vendor link only – I believe).
These image specifications must be met as closely as possible; otherwise your appearance will be dramatically distorted and if you are really careless, horrific to look at.
A summary of the photo criteria are, to use a passport style photo (Close up, looking straight ahead, eyes open, well lit and without shadows on face). Your hair must be away from your face, glasses should be removed.
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KEY NOTE:The key to understanding this preparation is to remember anything shown in the photograph on or close around the face will be transferred awkwardly to the face map, like a tattoo.The idea is to capture a clean image of the facial features only, without expression. Glasses and hair can be added afterwards using sl accessories.
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Refraining from expression is required to maintain the shape of your face in a relaxed format, which works best for this service. For example, grinning with teeth sparkling will result in the exposed teeth to become mapped around the opening of the mouth. Keeping your mouth closed in this situation is a must ;)
Criteria met.
Then you are ready to generate a relaxed and natural looking texture map. Next step is very simple; just select your avatar gender, then browse and upload your picture to the website.
It is quickly processed and a preview of your face map is displayed on an avatar viewer which can be rotated, zoomed upon and scrutinised.
Looking at the preview straight on, the results are quite impressive. However when using the interface to rotate your preview, the limitations of this service are revealed. The features of the face appear stamped onto and the face and the remaining photograph is then blurred away leaving just the facial details.
For a fully automated service, which correctly positions texture to geometry, matches avatar skin tone to face map and removes the excess from the image, it is an impressive system.
A side effect of this processing often causes the eyebrows, corners of eyes and the chin to bleed around the sides of the face.
Producing a distorted blur and streaking (see photo example for these phenomenon)
(I used an image of a well known face to test this system, not my own face)
Also the qualities of the face are in sharp detail, which contrasts significantly to the obvious blurring on the sides of the face.
This is not a real problem though because AutoFace, kindly supplies your texture in .jpg format, which you can load into an image editing application and tidy up.
When you are happy with the overall appearance of your map select continue, here you will be asked for your email address where your new texture will be delivered. I didn’t proceed any further during my research; however I presume having paid the kiosk $L2700 back at the sl store that your purchase will be delivered via email.
This presumption is made because it is advertised that your texture will be supplied in an editable .jpg format, which can then be cleaned up.
My experience of trying to use this service (using try for free option), was that it was not easy to end up with a good looking avatar face in the preview display. I’m by no means an expert in this field of study and tried my very best to get a nice looking texture preview all correctly aligned, but unfortunately I failed to do so. However you sl gurus won’t be fazed by this new glimpse into the future of avatar makeovers,
I’m sure you will get better results than I achieved and if not then you may have a laugh ;)
Neuron Bandit