Projected Face Backpack

White PETG and PVC pipe - 1200mm x 450mm x 1450mm (L x W x H). 

SKILLS USED: Solidworks CAD, FDM 3D printing, Projection

The Idea:
Previously I gave this idea a shot with Projected Face Test. With that first build some things went right, and some things went wrong - but as always I learned a lot from the experience.

For the first version I thought I could make the rig light enough to be balanced off of a helmet (that way the puppeteer's head gestures would be transmitted to the projected face). In hindsight that was a terrible idea and this time around I secured the rig to a backpack (although this has removed those character movements).

I also made this version more manageable by using a smaller face as well as decreasing the rig length by bouncing the projected light off of a mirror.

And finally I got a basic version of not quite real time facial animation to run on a variety of different projected face looks.

This build had 3 major parts to it: the face, the backpack rig, and the hat

For the face I used the same model as before and re-scaled it to a slightly smaller size (500mm tall) and with 100% infill so it would be made from solid pieces of plastic. What I was trying this time was if the whole thing was solid plastic, I could "weld" the seams and fill+sand rough patches with a 3D pen.

The backpack rig was fairly simple, it was mainly custom PVC pipe joiners with threaded holes to lock everything down. I only drew up as many parts as I needed to print everything and have a plan of action.

Two of things I'm happiest about with this design are that everything prints without support material and how it connects to the face.

The Hat was pretty straight forward, I used a scaled sketch image top-down shot of the hat to estimate the curvature of the hat and brim.

I'm a big fan of KISS - Keep It Simple Stupid. So when I had a look at an old bump cap that fit tightly to the head with a ridged plastic insert, I knew that was my cheap and easy base to build off of.

Lastly, how the camera feed was going to link to the projector was the part of this project I was most worried about.

While it was possible to directly link the two, I needed to rotate and scale the output image to align it with the face. So to do this I had to stream my phone screen to a laptop (Link to Windows), and then take part of that laptop display image and transform that (OBS studio), before sending it to the projector . The final piece of the puzzle is what facial tracking/animation to use - while not amazing, Snapchat "lenses" offered a variety of different characters with at least basic facial animation that perfectly suited this proof of concept.

Unfortunately, some snapchat lenses have short rendering times, as well as the wireless phone to laptop link also adds a delay to the video stream that seems to compound with time. While not a deal breaker for these tests, this is something that would need to be ironed out before the projected character face could sync with the voice and actions.

The only way I could see what the projected face above me was doing was to use the bathroom mirror - it was a tight fit in there to say the least. I edited out all of the "BRAWWW" noises I was making, but please enjoy the fish faces.

So where might this be used?

I think early versions of this concept would be perfect for low stakes environments like a roaming character in Halloween Horror Nights or a night time parade. The next step for later versions could be used for short meet and greet shows (Po LIve!/Shrek&Donkey/Turtle Talk) where an actor could fully express the full range of over the top animated emotion without sticking to a script.