IT SOUNDS painful, but software that removes the skin from people and objects could give home movies Hollywood-style effects.
If film-makers want to add special effects to a moving object, they normally have to be drawn into every single frame. Unwrap Mosaic, developed by a team of researchers from Microsoft and the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, does this automatically. First, it tracks the positions of 5000 points on an object as it moves during a video. It then uses information about the distances between the points to create a 2D virtual 鈥渟kin鈥� that accurately represents the 3D geometry of the object.
Special effects are then added to the skin 鈥� which is much easier than adding them to every frame of the movie. Finally, the process is reversed to wrap the edited skin back over the object.
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