Facial recognition taken to the next level in virtual reality

Faces can unlock smartphones, provide access to a secure building, and speed up passport control at airports, verifying identities for numerous purposes. An international team of researchers from Australia, New Zealand and India has taken facial recognition technology to the next level, using a person's expression to manipulate objects in a virtual reality setting without the use of a handheld controller or touchpad. In a world first study led by the University of Queensland, human computer interaction experts used neural processing techniques to capture a person's smile, frown and clenched jaw and used each expression to trigger specific actions in virtual reality environments. One of the researchers involved in the experiment, University of South Australia's Professor Mark Billinghurst, says the system has been designed to recognize different facial expressions via an EEG headset. "A smile was used to trigger the'move' command; a frown for the'stop' command and a clench for the'action' command, in place of a handheld controller performing these actions," says Prof Billinghurst.