Tell Me the Truth

OpenFrameworks is a free and open source application framework designed for creative coding.  OpenFrameworks is written in C++ and runs on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux.  It is developed and maintained by Zachary Lieberman and Theo Watson and a growing group of collaborators.
The library is a multimedia C++ framework for artists, and on some level it attempts to do for C++ what Processing has done for Java.

In addition to the computer vision library OpenFrameworks also allow to load files exported by Blender. (One of Corey’s suggestion for the 3d part)
I’ve found some examples about the integration with blender and thought  they work with very simples geometries,  it is definitely a feasible option.

The tracking:

The red square determines the area in the video that the computer vision system is detecting as an human face.  This coordinates are the information that we can get from the program.
This tracking is bidimentional.

For the computer vision part of the project the idea is to use openFrameworks to implement the face tracking that is going to control de avatar.

Thanks to the openFrameworks forum I found more information about the algorithm used in the openCV library.

The method is based on the research of Paul Viola and Michael Jones published in the paper Robust Real-Time Face Detection, and extended by Rainer Lienhart.

Although openFrameworks was my first option to implement the project I’ve been also researching about different alternatives.

One of the most interesting is the new faceAPI of seeingmachines that apparently has a very robust 3D tracking solution and that has exactly the functionality that the project requires.

I’ve been in contact with Nick Cerneaz from Seeing Machines requesting information about a non-commercial license to use the API. Right now I’m waiting to hear from Nick Langdale to get more information about it.

Another possibility is the software that comes incorporated with the Logithec Quickcam Orbit MP
Not sure how “hackable” can be yet.