Morphing Identity

“Morphing Identity” is one of the research project of “Cybernetic Humanity ” by Shunichi Kasahara, a researcher at Sony CSL to explore the “new humanity” emerged from the integration of humans and computers.

Morphing Identity: Exploring Self-Other Identity Continuum through Interpersonal Facial Morphing Experience

This project explores the continuous change in self-other identity by designing an interpersonal facial morphing experience where the facial images of two users are blended and swapped over time. Both users’ facial images are displayed side by side, with each user controlling their own morphing facial images, allowing us to create and investigate a multifaceted interpersonal experience. To explore this with diverse social relationships, we conducted qualitative and quantitative investigations through public exhibitions. The results indicate that a there is a window of self-identification as well as a variety of interpersonal experiences in the facial morphing process. From these insights, a Self-Other Continuum represented by a sense of agency and facial identity has implications in terms of the social and subjective aspects of interpersonal communication, which enables further scenario design and could complement findings from research on interactive devices for remote communication.

Reference :
Kye Shimizu, Santa Naruse, Jun Nishida, and Shunichi Kasahara. 2023.
Morphing Identity: Exploring Self-Other Identity Continuum through Interpersonal Facial Morphing Experience.
In Proceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’23), April 23 – 28, 2023, Hamburg, Germany. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 15 pages.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3544548.3580853

Morphing Identity Exhibition Project (2021-2022)

What is our identity? This work provides an experience in which a face that you know to be your own will be transformed into the face of another person.　Based on the human perceptual characteristics of visual changes, computationally created perceptually smooth change is applied to the facial image and composited in real-time, causing the face to change without perceiving the change. By focusing on the fluidity of identity that facial images have, we explore how the self that you think you are and the self that others think you are can be transformed.

Credit

Concept and Research
– Shunichi Kasahara (Sony CSL)
System
– Shunichi Kasahara (Sony CSL)
– Kye Shimizu (Sony CSL )
– Naoto Ienaga（Keio University）
Technical Assistant
– Kazuma Takada（Sony CSL）
– Maki Sugimoto（Keio University）
– Taku Tanichi (Sony CSL)