Morphing Identity

Morphing Identity: Exploring Self-Other Identity Continuum through Interpersonal Facial Morphing Experience

We explored continuous changes in self-other identity by designing an interpersonal facial morphing experience where the facial images of two users are blended and then swapped over time. Both users’ facial images are displayed side by side, with each user controlling their own morphing facial images, allowing us to create and investigate a multifaceted interpersonal experience. To explore this with diverse social relationships, we conducted qualitative and quantitative investigations through public exhibitions. We found that there is a window of self-identification as well as a variety of interpersonal experiences in the facial morphing process. From these insights, we synthesized a Self-Other Continuum represented by a sense of agency and facial identity. This continuum has implications in terms of the social and subjective aspects of interpersonal communication, which enables further scenario design and could complement findings from research on interactive devices for remote communication.

Kye Shimizu, Santa Naruse, Jun Nishida, and Shunichi Kasahara. 2023. Morphing Identity: Exploring Self-Other Identity Continuum through Interpersonal Facial Morphing Experience. In Proceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’23), April 23– 28, 2023, Hamburg, Germany. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 15 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3544548.3580853

Credit for research project: Kye Shimizu, Santa Naruse, Jun Nishida, and Shunichi Kasahara.

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Where is the boundary of self? How do we feel and interact with each other? We explored continuous changes in self-other identity by designing an interpersonal facial morphing experience where the facial images of two users are blended and then swapped over time.

With Morphing Identity system, two users’ facial images are displayed side by side, with each user controlling their own morphing facial images, allowing us to create and investigate a multifaceted interpersonal experience.

To explore this with diverse social relationships, we conducted qualitative and quantitative investigations through public exhibitions, beyond the lab environment.

Our findings suggest a window of self-identification and a variety of interpersonal experiences in the facial morphing process.

Morphing Identity: Exploring Self-Other Identity Continuum through Interpersonal Facial Morphing Experience (a) A histogram of the reported boundary value. The solid line depicts the kernel density estimation of the distribution (N = 3411). The dotted line represents the peak in the histogram. (b) Cumulative distribution of reported boundary value. The dotted line represents the point of halfway 50% recognition of the self-face.

We synthesized a Self-Other Continuum, with implications for interpersonal communication and interactive devices for remote communication.

Morphing Identity Exhibition Project (2021-2022)

What is our identity? Morphing Identity system provides an experience where your face will be transformed into the face of another person. With leveraging the human perceptual characteristics of visual changes, computationally created perceptually smooth change is applied to the facial image in real-time. Our integrated system composites realistic real-time morphing images of users’ faces by performing face animation reenactment with interpolated projected latent codes of two faces in a latent space of a GAN (Generative Adversarial Network). This perceptually gradual face morphing composition allows us to change the face image without perceiving the visual change. By focusing on the fluidity of facial identity we have, we explore how the self that you think you are and the self that others think you are can be transformed.

私たちのアイデンティティとは何か。本作品は、自分の顔だと分かっている筈なのに、自分だった顔がいつの間にか他者の顔に変容していく体験を提供する。人間の変化知覚特性に基づいて、計算的に作り出された知覚的に滑らかな変化を顔映像に適応して、リアルタイムに自他の比率を徐々に変えながら顔映像を再合成することで、変化を知覚しない顔画像の変化を引き起こす。映像を介したコミュニケーションにおいて、個人を識別するための顔映像が持つアイデンティティの流動性に着目し、自分自身が思う自分と、他者が思う自分がどのように変容し得るかを探索する体験型の作品である。

Credit for exhibition projects

Concept and Research
– Shunichi Kasahara (Sony CSL)
System
– Shunichi Kasahara (Sony CSL)
– Kye Shimizu (Sony CSL)
– Santa Naruse (Sony CSL)
– Naoto Ienaga (Tsukuba University)
Technical Assistant
– Kazuma Takada (Sony CSL)
– Taku Tanichi (Sony CSL)
– Maki Sugimoto (Keio University)