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For MMOs, are there engines for mapping inputs from a webcam into the virtual world? In other words, if there is a group of 50 online characters together, is there a way to see all their facial expressions or real faces together?

House
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Simon
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  • You could use something like OpenCV to detect if and where a face can be seen on the webcam. You could then create a texture of the detected region and send that to the other players. – Roy T. Mar 31 '12 at 06:40
  • Is it being done today and for how many simultaneous players? – Simon Mar 31 '12 at 11:13
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    No, if you want a feature that has not been in any other game yet there is most definitely not an engine or library available for providing that function. Make it yourself or it ain't going to happen. (Bad idea by the way, but that is just my opinion.) – aaaaaaaaaaaa Mar 31 '12 at 11:13
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    It's a lot of work to make, probably will end up quite flawed anyway, takes a lot of bandwidth, makes an extra hardware requirement and possibly require some user setup. There are privacy issues. And for all this it delivers no gameplay value, it is just a gimmick that, even if you did overcome all the obstacles, wouldn't make the game tangibly better. – aaaaaaaaaaaa Mar 31 '12 at 13:09
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    Cue in 3..2..1.. 4chan and somethingawful naughty body parts flooding MMO screens nation wide. – Patrick Hughes Mar 31 '12 at 18:15
  • This is a "which engine should I use" question, which is explicitly off-topic for this site, as per the FAQ here: http://gamedev.stackexchange.com/faq and discussion here: http://meta.gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/695/are-what-should-i-use-to-do-x-questions-really-on-topic-and-good – Trevor Powell Mar 31 '12 at 22:07
  • I'd suggest modifying your question to ask about how to implement that feature, and if there is middleware that helps with that then it might get linked to. But my guess is that if you're trying to do real time facial mocap with webcam data you have your work cut out for you. – Tetrad Apr 01 '12 at 04:59
  • This is a really really horrible idea, as others have pointed out. However, it might be slightly better if instead of splatting on the character, it was used just for the character "icon" (that one at the left of the life&mana bar). – o0'. Apr 01 '12 at 21:52

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There are very few "MMO engine" middleware products at all -- see this question for some examples. None of them support splatting webcam feeds onto player models; such a thing is not really an MMO-specific feature and consequently there's no reason for it to be part of an MMO middleware package.

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