By Melissa Dykes

Talk about wag the dog. I’m not even sure what to write for a description of the video you are about to watch.

So-called “reality” can be edited in real-time.

It’s the matrix.

The project is a joint effort in progress between Stanford, the Max Planck Institute for Informatics, and the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg. According to the project’s abstract, via Stanford University:

We present a novel approach for real-time facial reenactment of a monocular target video sequence (e.g., Youtube video). The source sequence is also a monocular video stream, captured live with a commodity webcam. Our goal is to animate the facial expressions of the target video by a source actor and re-render the manipulated output video in a photo-realistic fashion. To this end, we first address the under-constrained problem of facial identity recovery from monocular video by non-rigid model-based bundling. At run time, we track facial expressions of both source and target video using a dense photometric consistency measure. Reenactment is then achieved by fast and efficient deformation transfer between source and target. The mouth interior that best matches the re-targeted expression is retrieved from the target sequence and warped to produce an accurate fit. Finally, we convincingly re-render the synthesized target face on top of the corresponding video stream such that it seamlessly blends with the real-world illumination.We demonstrate our method in a live setup, where Youtube videos are reenacted in real time.

Watch the video here: http://www.activistpost.com/2016/03/reality-edited-in-real-time-new-tech-shows-why-you-cant-trust-anything-you-see-on-the-news.html?