Overview

Smile, and the robot smiles back. Raise an eyebrow, and it mirrors you PERFECTLY. Make a weird face, and... yeah, it does that too. Southbank Centre's facial tracking installation let visitors puppeteer digital characters using nothing but their expressions. Watching people realize their face controls the robot? Pure magic. Every. Single. Time.

Features

Kinect depth sensing + Faceshift's facial recognition tracks 50+ landmark points in real-time. Unity maps these to avatar blend shapes with sub-frame latency—the mirror effect is instantaneous and slightly uncanny. Multiple avatars (robots, aliens, animals) let visitors try on different digital identities. This was 2015—YEARS before Memoji and TikTok filters made face tracking normal. Southbank Centre/Abstraction literally demonstrated the future to amazed visitors who had no idea their phone would do this five years later.