Epic Games acquired Hyprsense this week, the real-time facial animation company formerly known as Binary VR.
Hyprsense specializes in capturing face movements which can then be transformed into a fully-animated 3D avatar in real-time. Initially, the company started with a VR-focused solution that captured accurate facial motion data using a 3D infrared capture camera that hung of the front of VR headsets. Then known as Binary VR, the company shipped dev kits in 2017 for headsets like the original Oculus Rift and HTC Vive.
Now, three years later, the company is known as Hyprsense and has been acquired by Epic Games. While Hyprsense is not a VR-focused enterprise anymore, videos of the technology demonstrate real-time facial motion capture running off a phone camera, which then transforms the face into a real-time 3D animation on the phone screen, as demonstrated below.
This is similar in principal to basic AR face tracking technology found in social media apps like Instagram and Facebook, but Hyprsense takes it one step further and allows you to fully replace your face with a completely different 3D avatar with a seemingly high degree of accuracy.
“Bringing on the Hyprsense team enables us to continue pushing digital character innovation even further and approach the goal of giving all creators full control over expressing their vision down to the smallest nuance,” said Kim Libreri, CTO of Epic Games, in a prepared statement.
Epic says that the Hyprsense team will be working primarily with its game development and digital humans teams, which will “help accelerate Epic’s journey to build new and better tools and systems for developers and players alike.”
