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FANCY yourself as a puppeteer? No? How about if the puppet were House of Cards star Kevin Spacey?

Cheap, controllable 3D CGI models of people鈥檚 faces can now be created simply using publicly available photos online. What鈥檚 more, their expressions can be manipulated using other people鈥檚 facial tics. One day, this could let us interact with avatars that look and act like people we know.

Currently, making such CGI models of a human face is expensive and requires laser scanning and motion capture.

But a team at the University of Washington in Seattle reasoned that, for celebrities at least, there are more than enough paparazzi photographs online to capture digitally what they look like from just about every possible angle.

鈥淭he idea was to create realistic virtual models of people just from photos rather than complex lab set-ups,鈥� says researcher Ira Kemelmacher-Shlizerman.

So a team led by Supasorn Suwajanakorn collected around 200 photos each of various famous people 鈥� including Spacey 鈥� from Google Images, taken in different poses and at varying angles. The photos were analysed using face-tracking software, and a realistic 3D model for their face and head created. Further analysis added wrinkles and textures that appear and disappear as expressions change.

The face of your digital PA? (Image: Netflix)

鈥淭he result is a full 3D model you can turn right around,鈥� says Suwajanakorn.

As well as being able to manipulate the digital puppets any way they wanted, the team found they could realistically switch an actor鈥檚 face with that of another 鈥� allowing them to be replaced throughout an entire TV show or movie, for example.

鈥淭he team could switch one actor鈥檚 face with another, replacing them in an entire TV show, for example鈥�

They created puppets of Arnold Schwarzenegger, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, for example, and gave them the facial expressions and tics of other people, such as George W. Bush. ().

One commercial application could be to provide famous animated faces for visual versions of Siri-like assistants, says Suwajanakorn. Another might be to automatically create 3D faces for telepresence robots, says Nicole Carey at humanoid robot maker Engineered Arts in Penryn, UK. 鈥淒on鈥檛 underestimate how much people want to be someone else,鈥� she says.

But plundering large digital image collections suggests an even more interesting, or creepy, application: 鈥淐reating a version of someone who鈥檚 close to you but no longer alive,鈥� says Kemelmacher-Shlizerman.

The face of someone who has died could be recreated and driven with one of the emerging breed of chatbots trained 鈥� using the deceased鈥檚 tweets and emails 鈥� to converse like them. 鈥淥ur model could bring back your memories of the people you care about,鈥� says Suwajanakorn.

This article appeared in print under the headline 鈥淵our own Kevin Spacey鈥�