World News for Students of English

11-09-2014 15:00

We’ve all heard the saying ’painting on a smile’. Well one Japanese artist has taken that phrase to a whole new level.

Nobumichi Asai has found a way to project and map expressions onto people’s faces, effectively creating a facial mask.

He and his team displayed their three-dimensional facial projection mapping system to a select group of spectators in Tokyo.

The team drew inspiration from the sense of beauty inherent in traditional Japanese culture, animation and technology. But they quickly discovered that simply projecting a totally symmetrical face, seen typically in video games, would produce a “Barbie Doll” look, killing the realism. So they instead designed a face asymmetrically introducing subtle flaws.

Asai and his team are currently looking for funding to take the project to the next level and are considering how they might be able to project on the human body next.

Difficult words: inherent (part of), subtle (small), flaw (imperfection), funding (financial help). Source: www.ondemandnews.com

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