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Over the last several months we have been seeing tweets pop up from the EA NBA Live account showing players getting their faces scanned. It seems that every time an NBA team travels to Orlando to face the Orlando Magic, EA Sports is there to scan the players and coaches faces for use in NBA Live 15. While most companies will over pay for technologies, EA took a different approach to player likenesses, the looked internally to their own "Dr. Frankenstein".
Jim Hejl is the Senior Research Scientist at EA and is baed at Tiburon Studios in Orlando, Florida. He came up with a face scanning rig that looks like something from Star Trek. The prototype however, looked like McGuyver and Dr. Emmett Brown (from "Back to the Future" fame) had a weekend bender in a local Home Depot. Using pocket cameras and PVC pipe, here is the monster Jim created:
The full production rig is portable and has traveled all over the country for different scans for different games. NBA Live 14 was highly criticized for poor player models and facial construction. It appears that EA is taking this very seriously and attacking the issue head on (pun intended). While we won't know the final results of this for several months, we can see that the production rig does a great job capturing scans.
It will take artists and animators quite a long time and tons of work to bring these images to life in the game but they are certainly off to a good start.