lo and behold: FACEBALL, a game you play with your face

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First: the game runs on PC, but requires a modern-ish iPhone running the facial motion capture app.

With that said: here it is:
https://shlaifu.itch.io/faceball

Faceball, the greatest face controlled game I know of. Yes, you control it with your face via facial mo-cap.
Both the game and the unity mo-cap app are free.

Is it a good control system? Not really. Does it technically work: yes.

Apart from the controls, I'm doing my own custom lighting calculations and made my own custom subsurface scattering in unity. I'm quite proud of the graphics, really.

Download it before your face melts!


(If you don't have an iphone, WASD, space and ctrl also works, rotate camera with q and e)

This looks a lot different from the old Faceball.

Can you make it control using brain waves, too?

Technically, yes. I know there are a few devices that read brain waves, but only extremely low resolution, so thinking "forward" could work as a signal, while thinking "backward" may not be distinguishable from "forward", so you'd need to think something very different, like, "pear" to go backward.

This here works through apple's ARKit, which is a machine learning model that is trained to interpret faces and outputs numeric values, like "eyebrows up 50%", which you can either use to animate a character - or abuse, like I'm doing, to trigger a "jump" command.

Sorry, guys; but when I saw the subject line, my first thought was this:

I've always wanted to try something that reads brain waves, it always seemed kind of crazy to me.

That would actually be really awesome for people with certain disabilities.
I watched a speedrun of a guy beating Zelda 2 with his chin. He used it to wiggle an analogue stick on a 360 controller.

Edit: Here it is. Dunno if he has it on YouTube too, was hard to track down: https://twitter.com/HanDcapableSean/sta ... 4697676815

The brain waves thing does sound crazy,yeah, but to be honest, steering a pinball around with your facial motions does have at least some of that "magic" sensation to it. It's extremely weird to control a thing without touching anything and making only facial movements which feel pretty small and you see movement and stuff on screen that feels way out of proportion, way bigger than the thing you yourself just did.

Regarding accessibility: yes - if you calibrate it. But also: no, you really do want a button or a stick that goves you some haptic feedback - merely twitching with your eyebrows is technically enough, but it's also incredibly hard to get under control, because you do move your face involuntarily, a lot.

A few years ago, I started drawing on a digital tablet, and it took me a fairly long time to get used to drawing with a plastic nib on a smooth plastic surface - there's very little friction, and it takes forever to get used pushing a pen in a controlled manner if there's just no feedback through friction, and i found it somewhat similar to control a videogame by just raising eyebrows, or making shapes with my mouth.
I ended up putting the thresholds relatively high, so you don't accidentally constantly trigger all the commands at once....