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Putting your face into Fallout 4 is exactly as cool as you'd think

Intel is very keen for you to know all about its RealSense technology, which combines three cameras to see and map the world. At CES 2016, it has a fun little demo that puts your noggin into Fallout 4. To do it, you sit very still in a chair with a dour, "I live in a post-nuclear-apocalypse-hellscape" expression and don't move. A very nice man takes an HP tablet with Intel's cameras on it and walks around you slowly while pointing it at your head with the itSeez3D app.

Very soon thereafter, the tablet has a 3D image of your face and pate in its Uraniom software. About three to five minutes later, it's been uploaded to a cloud service that talks to Fallout 4 on the PC. You then boot up Fallout 4 and there's your face, ready to take on mutants. As you run around, your face keeps that same determined expression, but the graphical quality more than good enough for you to recognize yourself and almost good enough to feel native to the game. Is it weird to see yourself so fully immersed in the uncanny valley? Yes, but it's also super fun to see that uncanny self strapped into power armor.

Uraniom and itSeez3D, the technologies behind putting your face into the game, have been around for awhile, so the innovation here is how quickly and well Intel's RealSense tech can 3D scan your head. It's pretty good, though you'd have to be pretty self-absorbed to want to spend the money you'd need to get a RealSense tablet just so you could see your own face in video games. Instead, Intel's goal is to make RealSense a widely adopted standard so that you have that option already built in to whatever you happen to buy next.

Update: see below for video showing how Sam Byford also got transplanted into the wasteland.

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Dieter Bohn in Fallout 4

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