The Medusa Facial Capture system, developed by DisneyResearch|Studios, consists of a mobile rig of cameras and lights coupled with proprietary software that can reconstruct actor’s faces in full motion, without using traditional motion-capture dots.

The technology comes as the result of many years worth of research and scientific advances in capturing and modeling of human faces.

Medusa delivers high-resolution 3D faces, with the ability to track individual pores and wrinkles over time, and can recover per-frame dynamic appearance (blood flow and shininess of the skin), providing a very realistic virtual face that is ideal for creating digital doubles for visual effects and computer games.

Medusa is useful in two primary scenarios: 1 – building an expression shape library, and 2 – reconstructing performance dialog. The following videos demonstrate examples of these two scenarios.