---
title: "Can You Tell This CGI Skin Apart from Actual Skin?"
description: "A team of researchers from the USC Institute for Creative Technologies and the Imperial College London jointly developed a new method for capturing the impossibly subtle deformations in human skin."
date: "2015-08-12"
modified: "2015-08-13"
authors:
  - name: "Andrew Tieu"
    link: "https://futurism.com/authors/andrew_tieu"
url: "https://futurism.com/can-you-tell-this-cgi-skin-apart-from-actual-skin"
categories:
  - "Science & Energy"
tags:
  - "computing"
---

# Can You Tell This CGI Skin Apart from Actual Skin?

![](<https://futurism.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/skinnnn.jpg>)

[![1382627881103724389](<https://futurism.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/1382627881103724389.gif>)](<https://futurism.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/1382627881103724389.gif>)

- Capturing every last wrinkle and deformation of human skin is basically impossible for talented CG animators and sophisticated video capture systems alike. Those infinitely subtle ways the skin moves on a human face allows us to spot the differences between a real-life humans, and their CG counterpart—at least for now.
- The team of researcher has come up with a new way to capture the tiny details on the surface of various skin patches on an actor’s face at a resolution of 10 microns as they’re being stretched and deformed by a specially-designed rig. At that resolution the exact deformations of even individual skin pores is captured, and using custom software, the captured data can be mapped to the artificial skin of a CG character, making the emotions of the face so realistic you can’t tell human from computer human.
- Eventually the researchers hope to design a model that allows the system to perfectly simulate exactly how human skin deforms based on a person’s race, age, sex, and emotions, without requiring actors to be subjected to that face deforming contraption.

Check out their video here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FXXdypEuR_M