Recently I have been looking at how the human race can have a whole body scan to render their body in 3d space, this has many applications like making a very personalised avatar which reflects your true self in a video game or allowing a 3d representation of yourself to act as identity in banking, travelling and money management situations. With the world going online a virtual avatar connected to passports as well as other digital versions of identification could be a viable option with online banking. With this in mind online banking could become completely virtual with VR and MR taking the reigns in how customer service is dealt with in the future.
Background
Facebook and other tech companies have been working on 3d imagery for quite some time now, implementing machine learning and neural networks to reconstruct 2d images into a 3d space. Recent advances in image-based 3D human shape estimation have been driven by the significant improvement in representation power afforded by deep neural networks. Although current approaches have demonstrated the potential in real world settings, they still fail to produce reconstructions with the level of detail often present in the input images.
Due to memory limitations in current hardware often the representation of images can be very unrealistic coming out with extremely low resolution, this means that full body images would have to be converted from high resolution images which is not readily accessible to everyone. To solve this problem a holistic approach is implemented to spot patterns within low resolution images, allowing objects such as the face and skin to be easily represented via art of duplication enabling the machine learning program used to spot patterns in skin formations and facial structure to therefore estimate highly detailed geometry on lower resolution images by observing key structures in higher-resolution images.
This is a learning process and needs time to process low resolution images into highly detailed 3d objects which could then be implemented into several industries.
Avatars
Within the gaming role playing game worlds new technology is being implemented to enable avatars to look exactly like their owners via 3d scanning and implementation. These 3d objects converted from a 2d image can then be automatically rigged thus allowing them to be used in game as a playable character.
This would allow the gaming experience to become much more personalised as well as allow existing social structures from the real world to project themselves into the game as users could then choose to reveal their real facial features to online friends in their trusted circle. This could be seen as a modern day equivalent to symbolise trust between people in online communities.
