EON Human Released! - A Review

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Well, last night (May 30, 2008) it was released! A limited version of EON Human with very basic features (which they call the Human Technical Preview) has been made available for the public to use online. They promise a more advanced version to be available next week on June 7th. They advertised this first release as a 3D reconstruction and a 3D “Spa Facial Treatment.” I got my first crack at it last night, and overall had mixed feelings. On the one hand, once I got it working it was really fun, but it took a while before I was able to get it to work. I will explain.

In order to use the EON Human, you must log in to their Ning network at http://eonhuman.ning.com. (I’m not sure why they used Ning as their home base, but that is the subject of another post.). If you are not registered for EON Human on Ning, you will have to fill out your email address, password, birthday, and a captcha. Once you are part of their “social network” you click on the banner at the top of the main page, which looks like the image above which says “EON Human Released!” This will take you to the start page on EON Reality’s webserver.

Step 1

The first main step is to upload a photograph of a face. You select “Browse,” choose a file from your computer, and then click upload. There are some limitations to the kind of face you can use. It works best on straight frontal face images. I’ve only used JPG images, so I’m unsure if it will accept other file formats, and you are never told what formats it accepts (this might be a good thing for them to add). File size is limited at 400kb, and the highest resolution image you can find without going over 400kb will give you the best quality 3D reconstruction. Smiles are acceptable, but no teeth should be showing. Glasses will not work well. They also give you an alternate link to use to upload if server load is high. You will also need the latest version of Adobe Flash.

Step 2

Once you have uploaded your photo, it will show it to you for review, and allow you to click a link to start “picking points.”

Step 3

This will take you to a new page with your photo on the left, and instructions on the right (there are also buttons at the top to progress forward and back through the questions). You are given a magnifier selector tool to pick 5 specific points on your face. This is so their software can properly align the average 3D face to your face in the photo. (The more advanced version to be released on June 7th will allow 9-11 picking points which will result in a higher quality shaped face).

This is also where it starts to get a bit tricky and confusing. The instructions are not completely clear, and if you don’t pick the points correctly, you will end up with a twisted face model, like this one on the right. The first 10 times or so I did it wrong, and ended up with a corrupted model like this. It was a bit frustrating. Finally I was able to figure out the correct order to pick the points on the face. Since last night the developers have included a clarification image on the Ning homepage showing the selection order of the points.

It goes something like this:

1. It says to “Click on the OUTER corner of your RIGHT eye.” This means your own right eye, not the right eye in the image.
2. It then says “Click on the OUTER corner of your LEFT eye.” This means your own left eye, not the left eye in the image. You can see where there might be confusion here.
3. It then says “Click on the tip of your nose.” This instruction is pretty clear. It means the point of your nose furthest out from your face, not the base by the nostrils, or any part of the bridge.
4. It then says “Click on the LEFT corner of your mouth.” This does not mean your own left corner. It means the left corner of the mouth as you see it in the image.
5. It then says “Click on the RIGHT corner of your mouth.” Again, this does not mean your own right corner. It means the right corner of the mouth as you see it in the image.

You can see how the semantics of the wording could be very confusing the first time around, or maybe even the tenth time, as it was for me. But the example image of the points on Angelina Jolie’s face helps a lot. Hopefully they will make this clearer in future upgrades.

Step 4

Once you are done selecting the points on your face, click the “Generate Face” button. You will then get a new popoup window (why a popup?) with a progress indicator and a message saying “Generating 3D face. This may take a minute. Please do not refresh your browser…” This process can take anywhere from 1-2 minutes up to 4-5, depending on the load of the server. At this point, the software is matching points on the average 3D face to the points you selected on the face in the photograph. It does this to align itself correctly to the face photo. Once it is aligned, it extracts some texture information, shape, color, and lighting conditions from the face photo and applies them to the average 3D face.

When it is done with this process, the 3D reconstruction is done and it presents you with the finished 3D face model for your review and approval. You can accept the face as is, start over, or rotate it right or left.

• Accept Face - This will continue on to the “Spa Facial Treatment” portion, which we will describe below.
• Start Over - This will take you back to a screen to register or log back into Ning. I’m not sure why it doesn’t just take you back to the upload page, or the pick points page. That would be more useful and intuitive.
• Rotate left or right - Since this is a 3D model, you can rotate it left and right using these buttons. It only has a range of about a 3/4 view of one side of the face, to a 3/4 view from the other side. It would be better if you could rotate it all the way to a profile view, or further, as well. It would also be better if this was controlled by a slider tool in real-time, rather than reloading each time you rotate the face.

Step 5

Selecting “Accept Face” will open another popup window (why the popups?), and present the facial manipulation features. You get a spinning carousel of all the different options available, like this:

Mousing-over the various faces shows you the different characteristics you can adjust, including:

• 3D Face - This is similar to the approval step that you just saw. If you click on this image, you can rotate the face from a 3/4 view of one side to the other, this time using a slider instead of buttons. But the image still doesn’t load in real-time as you move the slider. Once you release the slider it reloads the image with a fade-in. This would be much more interactive if the model updated in real-time as you moved the slider. It would also be better if you could rotate it to at least a profile view.
• Feminine - This option will allow you to adjust the perceived femininity of the face. Adjusting it to the right is more feminine, and to the left is less feminine and closer to the original. I have found that somewhere in the middle gives you the best representation of your face looking feminine. If you move it too far to the right, it begins to look a little clownish.
• Masculine - Like the Feminine option, this allows you to adjust the perceived masculinity of the face. Adjusting to the right is more masculine, and to the left is less and closer to the original. Again, I think somewhere in the middle gives you the best perception. If you move it too far to the right, you get an over exaggerated expression which looks like an unshaven, unslept, Fabio-looking, drug lord.
• Fat - The fat adjustment does just that, it adds to or takes away the “chubbiness” factor from your face. Moving it all the way to the right gives a chubby face indeed.
• Thin - Similarly, the thin adjustment makes your face look more bony, with less flesh. Moving it all the way to the right gives the perception of extreme weight loss.
• Beautiful - This is an interesting adjustment. It is supposed to add to the “beautiness” factor of your face, making it more beautiful as you move the slider to the right. It appears to enhance the features of your face, such as the eyebrows, eyes, and lips. It only works well in moderate amounts. Using the feminine tool on a female face, or the masculine tool on a male face, might work better in creating this perception of increased beauty.
• Ugly - This adjustment makes your face look old and ugly. It adjusts the eyes, eyebrows, mouth, fleshiness, texture, wrinkles, etc.., to give a perception of increased “ugliness” and age. Moving it to the far right makes you look like a very old, wrinkly, person indeed.

In future upgrades, it would be cool to be able to adjust more than one of these factors at once, such as looking at a 3/4 view of the face while changing the perceived gender. Since it appears as though these are all pre-rendered and generated images, this would exponentially add to the number of images stored for each face, and could be hard on storage capacity. But perhaps something like this will be offered in the more advanced version next week.

One more note, you have to click directly on the slider pointer and drag it to make it move. It would be nice if you could click on the bar to make it move as well. Also, when you click on a new feature you must move the slider to reset the image the first time.

Embedding

Below all of this there is a notice to “Copy this into your MySpace!”, and then they give you the HTML code to use to embed this Adobe Flash face manipulation object into your MySpace page, or anywhere else where you can embed code. I don’t have a MySpace page, so I had to alter the code some and use an add-in HTML application to Facebook to get it on my profile there (I will give instructions on how to do this in a future post.  They have also indicated that native Facebook integration is coming soon). Clearly the folks at EON Reality are counting on many people adding this object to their MySpace pages so that their friends and family will see it, be introduced to EON Human, and come generate their own faces, an interesting viral marketing strategy. We will see if this works for them. (I think it would have been better for them to use a Facebook fan page than a Ning social network, but we will see how this goes. In the meantime, I have made a EON Human Facebook fan page for those that want to follow it on Facebook. Click on the link and become a fan today!).

A big problem/bug for the viral thing to happen right now is that the buttons that it places at the bottom of the widget object, “Tell a Friend,” or “Make Me,” don’t appear to work. I would imagine that “Tell a Friend” would email a notice to someone you choose, and the “Make Me” button would take you to the EON Human Ning site so that you could make your own EON Human reconstruction. But these don’t currently work, unfortunately.

From here, the only option you are given is to embed the code they give you. If you leave this page without copying the code, you will have lost all the work you did up to this point, and will have to start over. There is no other option to save your reconstructed face to an account. Something like this would be useful.

Conclusion

So there you have it, the long-awaited first version of EON Human is now available to the average consumer online! It will be very interesting to see what features they add to the “advanced” version next week. I’m anxious to see this new technology flourish and grow. I think it has a lot of potential in many different ways, which we will talk about here at EONHuman.com. This will no doubt become a big thing in the computer graphics world.

Here is my first EON Human widget of myself. Feel free to explore:

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