Like Slinkies and Silly Putty originating from flubbed technology, some of the cooler Web services have originated from tech originally intended for government agencies.
BigStage is definitely one of those services. It uses three photos of your face to map your features onto a virtual head using technology developed for the CIA. Your magic head is rendered into various scenes from popular movies, television shows, and digital shorts--including clips from The A-Team. You can then send those clips to your friends, parents, and relatives to be thoroughly confused and/or entertained by your shenanigans.
The service was originally demoed at both CES and the Under the Radar conference back in June, and made its formal public launch earlier Wednesday. I gave it a spin this afternoon and it managed to transfer shots of my face into what the service calls an "@ctor" in about a minute. After it's done mapping you can tweak various appearance elements from a rather simplistic Flash-based editing tool. I found it to be maddening in that it makes you scroll through each set of sunglasses, hairdos, and accessories page by page. After using something like Spore's Creature Creator, it feels decidedly old-school.
You can save each set of customizations as its own @ctor, each of which can be inserted into video clips with a single click. You can make changes to your character on the fly and see them updated live. To share a video it has to first render you in, which takes about three minutes, although the link to send it to someone else is immediately available.
Another company that's doing this is Gizmoz with its "be a star" feature. The big difference is that BigStage has a much wider range of clips from popular TV content whereas Gizmoz has a small selection of original content and music videos. That said, there is a downside; you must first install a small piece of software to use BigStage, and it only works with PCs running Windows XP or Vista.
I've embedded a sample clip using my face below. If you're having trouble seeing it you can also check it out on this page.
We're total suckers for video products that let us use our face. A few months back, Caroline put my head on a woman's body with the launch of JibJab's Starring You service, and shortly before that, Rafe played around with Fix8, which lets you overlay live video with avatar and object overlays. Both are vastly different technologies, but the idea is the same: quick entertainment with very little effort on the part of the end user. Along the same lines, Gizmoz, which has been providing 3-D face-mapping technology to the masses since late May, is launching a new product this morning called "be a star."
Be a star is essentially a really simple way to insert yourself into a variety of clips from TV shows, movies, and music videos. Using the same technology found in its basic talking avatar service, Gizmoz will take any photo of someone's face you throw at it, and convert it into a 3-D head that's capable of minute facial movements. You can sort through clips that use just one user face, or multiples that let you add up to three different people. The resulting video can then be stuck on a social networking page, or shared with a simple link.
For now you're limited to 10 clips, but the company is planning to add more every day. Eventually Gizmoz aims to let users use the same technology on any of its videos, allowing you to paste your friend's head on the family dog, or onto the Thanksgiving turkey.
I've embedded a sample video below, which I put together in just a few minutes. The facial processor only hiccupped once, but it was because of my crummy photo of Rafe's head. If you've already got processed 3-D heads in your gallery, it takes a little over a minute to put the entire thing together. My one qualm is that while depending on the original clip, the heads tend to be tiny and the video only comes in one size, although I think you'll agree this is a pretty great way to make embarrassing videos of your boss.
Tonight Gizmoz is launching an upgrade to its service that brings photo face-mapping technology to user avatars. Originally the service allowed users to add voice clips to various pre-existing characters, including celebrities, inanimate objects, and house pets. With this new technology, users can upload a photo of themselves and the service will automatically map their face to a moving, talking character.
Once user faces have been mapped, the service takes on a look and feel a little similar to that of Meez [review] with a build-it-yourself creation tool. Users can adorn their avatar in all sorts of clothing and hairstyle combinations. They can also record 20-second voice clips that will sync up with facial movements and gestures. The result is something that's both visually interesting and a tad creepy (in a Lawnmower Man kind of way).
Gizmoz claims that the entire process takes "under two minutes." Founder and CEO Eyal Gever explained to me that this face-mapping technology was what he originally intended when the service was in its infancy in 2003. It just took a few years to become viable and easy to use.
With the new face-mapping functionality, Gizmoz is also launching two new ways to share user-created talking heads. Previously users could only embed their creation as video clips. Gizmoz is now offering "stickers" and what the service calls an "answering machine." Stickers allow users to record a custom message, almost like a digital Post-it note. This service is aimed mostly for social network comment boards like MySpace.
The new answering machine feature is the more interesting of the two. Users can create and embed their own message (just like Stickers), and visitors can record and respond with their own Gizmoz video responses right inside the player. The new tool reminds me a little bit of Jaxtr's VoiceBlast widget, although a little less businesslike.
Gizmoz is launching these new services in conjunction with a distribution deal with RockYou and Freewebs. Users of both services will now be able to integrate Gizmoz. In my first experience with the site in February, I called it a "gag service." With this update, I think Gizmoz has become a very serious competitor to other social networking add-ons--especially Meez.
I've embedded the answering machine widget to the left. Feel free to add your own responses, and enjoy the head banging.
Normally I stay away from gag sites like this, but Gizmoz is a guilty pleasure that caught my attention with its eccentric sense of humor. Gizmoz is a "Talking Heads" video creator that lets you make your own gag videos to send via e-mail or embed on your site.
There are a variety of characters to choose from, primarily celebrities and political figureheads, all with matching voice banks and caricature-like faces, many of which are slightly offensive. You also get the option to pick a slightly cheesy animated background. The real clincher for the service is the ability to use a microphone to record your message, or you can simply type in some text to be spoken by the computer. When you're all done, Gizmoz puts it all together in an animated video with a talking and moving 3D character. What amazed me about the service is how good the text-to-voice handled some of the words I fed it. The actual voice inflection and sentence structure--not so much.
Gizmoz lacks some handy features, such as being able to use the service without registering, and non-Windows Media Player save options (for Mac folks). I'd also like to see an option to turn the autoplay off on the embeds, something sure to drive your site or blog visitors nuts. We used Splashcast (read our earlier coverage) to embed this video and avoid the autoplay. Other than that, Gizmoz is a great deal of silly fun.
[Found on SomewhatFrank]
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