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Comment by p4bl0 | Hacker News Reader

It would be cool privacy-wise to have some sort of virtual webcam that could share such an animation rather than what the webcam actually sees.

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This is fairly easy to wire up on Linux using v4l2loopback and pyfakewebcam.

I am currently using a little setup that uses OpenCV to acquire frames from the real camera, TensorFlow/BodyPix to compute an alpha mask for the foreground (me) and then OpenCV again to transform and composite myself behind news desks and into car infotainment screens and the like, eventually writing it to a virtual webcam I can use from Zoom (over its own virt bg feature this adds the layering and perspective transforms), Jitsi, Teams, etc.

The above looks like another fun thing to add. Time to go full Who Framed Roger Rabbit? ...

Do you have any more details written up anywhere on how you do this? That sounds like a great project.

There was a recent technical write-up about something similar: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22823070

Yep. Complete agree with sbarre. Could you kindly share more details? Would definitely like to do this as a weekend hack.

It sounds like a cool idea. Probably a platform to act on a play/script as the characters themselves? Like, a social theatre kind of thing with pre-animated background and stuff, where you only do your character part.

Aha, that's a completely different application than what I had in mind (just an alt webcam that's better than a static picture for communication while still protecting your visual identity), but it would be amazingly cool =).

The Snap Camera desktop app offers features somewhat similar to what you're seeking, as long as you combine it with the right filters. I imagine that the open source repo in the OP will eventually be used in an app like this.

This is a great idea! It should be great for bandwidth too - rather than sending full cam frames multiple times a second, it only needs to send deformation information describing movements.

Hah that's what video compressors do!

OBS studio can do that.

Please more details - I can not find any feature on the OBS website similar to what we see here. Do we need some plugin / extension? Please give us some urls, thank you!

As a commercial solution there's facerig+live2d that already does that.

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