I'm always complaining about tech and I gotta say, this game looks great as far as believe-able characters and lip syncing. I'm too into action games to buy this thing but from the video below I guess they used facial capture and all the little switches and small gestures looks far beyond that POS Heavy Rain game. It gets the top nomination from me as far as characters go.

Check it out:
http://www.gamespot.com/ps3/adventure/lanoire/video/6313909/la-noire-video-review

Yeah, it's basically this CG tech, played back in a game engine via animated textures/deformation maps (even colour changes like blushing, or geometry changes like skin wrinkling is captured by this system). Pretty cool tech.

I saw that coming, the lips were just slightly too stretched on the sides. Doesn't seem much different from dot-tracking though in terms of final results. I really can't think of any other game that comes close to this right now though in terms of decent lip syncing/facial gestures.

Doesn't seem much different from dot-tracking though in terms of final results.

It's basically dot tracking with 1 million dots, which instead of producing bone movements for a facial rig, produces an entirely new high-poly mesh for each frame.

Where does it say that? I read on their site:

"Algorithms also take into consideration detailed pixel information about a person's eye, teeth, tongue, skin, and jaw movements, allowing FACEWARE to build complex three dimensional data models specific to an individual and his or her performance."

That makes it sound like it only builds 1 model, a "data model". Is there somewhere else that talks about what they are doing?

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The facial animation tech in LA Noire is super-cool, but the body animations look stiff and unrealistic by comparison: having realistic facial animations actually makes the rest of the animation feel worse.

That said, it looks very cool and I've been waiting for a good mystery game where you actually solve a mystery, so I'll be picking this one up.