In the Lord of the Rings, the body of the actor was used to map and control the body of Gollum in a realistic fashion. The same was not done with his face, but it could be - although perhaps not to the same amount of detail.
Now imagine a simple line drawing of a face. How detailed would a camera's model of a human face need to be in order to extract just that much information from the face - the size of the smile, dimples, the angle and placement of the brows and perhaps lines on the forehead. Could this be extracted using a simple webcam?
How cool would it be to have this cariacature of a face (simple smiley line drawing) represent the other person in IM conversations, as a two way conversation? How much data would need to be sent in order to get decent responsiveness?
How well could you map this line drawing to a 3D face, that merely morphs along the same control lines as this line-drawing face?
How possible is this?
