If you’ve been following me on Facebook, you’ve probably seen me paying a little bit with some AI/ML projects in my quest for VR/AR, Digital Art, and Tech in general. But since there’s no CUDA supported GPUs on Apple’s MacBook Pro (unless you use a Windows PC), we can’t really run some Open Source AI/DL and DeepFake projects, such as Avatarify!
But no worries! I’ve got your back! Although my PC is running Elementary OS (Linux) and I can easily fork and run most of the projects from GitHub, my GPU is not powerful enough, so I did it on Google’s Colab Cloud!
Create your own 3D model (Digital Twin) by using only a single picture!
Here’s how I used AI and turned 2D images of myself and others into 3D models with PIFuHD on Google Colab’s Cloud, and it’s amazing! It’s so easy to export it to Blender and other 3D modelling tools and VR/AR apps! Even capturing and animating people will be so much easier now! Last time I was so excited about 3D tools was when I discovered 3D Studio Max 5 as a kid. That’s why I’m so excited about AI/ML for VR/AR applications, not to mention the new iPhone 12’s LiDAR sensor, this will make it easy for creators to achieve more, and to create the next AR/XR cloud and a digital twin for the entire world. Now I’m waiting for Impersonator++ to release their source code too. Maybe then we’ll be able to do even more, for example – I want to try and train this algorithms to learn the body language and moves of historic figures such as Elvis Presley, Marilyn Monroe, and Frank Sinatra, etc. Creating 3D holograms of them in AR, this could change the entertainment industry! What a time to be alive! 🙂
Code: https://github.com/facebookresearch/p…
Video: https://www.facebook.com/startuxnet/p…
You can use Google Colab also to create a DeepFake and prank friends on Zoom calls.
This time, here’s how to run AI/ML & DeepFake projects from Google Colab on your Smartphone!🤖 So there’s no Avatarify for Android yet, but looks like you can do what I did and run / compile it on Colab and then simply give it access to your phone’s camera! And you are done!🥸 In order to prank friends and family on video calls such as Whatsapp, zoom, Skype etc. We’ll need some sort of OBS studio for Android, but I didn’t have time to get into this, so comment and let me know if you have any ideas about that.
Here’s another one. Looks like world leaders like my Facebook page… How cool is that?! 😉
So, after testing Google’s Colab and their cloud GPUs last week in order to turn a 2D image of myself into a 3D model with PIFuHD’s algorithms to test it in VR/AR, this weekend I had a new experiment – DeepFake, and AR Holographic Masks during Zoom calls. Once again, with some cool Open Source projects such as First Order Motion and Avatarify. I managed to set it on my Mac and Linux machines, but once again, since my GPU is not powerful enough (CUDA supported) I had to try it over Google Colab. The FPS is fine. I also tested Eyal Gruss’s Colab project which is entirely online (you don’t need to install stuff on your computer).
It’s not perfect and also far from other DeepFake focused and open source projects, but if you want to have fun with AR masks in ZOOM calls, it’s quite nice!
A bonus – You can also use a reference videos from Movies or Some talented people on YouTube to make your Avatarify pupet say some known lines from Movies. So, after I made our PM’s (Benjamin Netanyahu) DeepFake video, now it’s time for his rivals, Benny Gantz! Well, that’s what you can do when some politicians are acting funny when watching news… This is what I made simultaneously when I heard on the news that our country, Israel is going to another election (#4 in 2 years
)… Sorry Gantz, you are a good guy, but I needed a reason for a funny DeepFake video to train the algorithm. 
Well, because the last one was terrible:
What’s Colab?
Google Colaboratory is a hosted Jupyter notebook environment that is free to use and requires no setup. It’s a free cloud service and it supports free GPU!
I hope this short post was helpful,
Have fun 🙂
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