Forget about Photoshop. This video demonstration is so amazing that it defies belief. It can take any video, identify the people in it, and change their physical attributes automagically. Yes, it even has a breast size slider.


In fact, the demonstration is so incredible that, at the beginning, I thought it was a joke.

But MovieReshape—as this application is called—is very real. We reported on it last week, but this demonstration really shows what it can do: It can basically transform Rosie O'Donnell into Christina Hendricks. And a flabby guy like myself into a Calvin Klein underwear model.


Created by Arjun Jain, Thorsten Thormählen, Hans-Peter Seidel and Christian Theobalt at the Max Planck Institut Informatik, this system allows anyone to easily manipulate "the body shape and proportions of a human actor in arbitrary video footage" by just using sliders in a control panel. Muscular level, breast girth, waist girth... you can even modify the stature of whoever you want by just moving a slider to the right of left.

How it works

First, MovieReshape identifies the human actors in a movie using shape recognition. It matches the shapes to three-dimensional bodies taken from a large database of models. Once this step is done, the program matches the 3D model to the position of the actor in the video, presenting different sliders to modify the body shape.


When the user changes a parameter, like the height of the model or the breast girth, the software warps the image to make that change in a realistic way. At any time, you can render the video with those changes.

In other words: Our virtual life is about to get as perfect as dating sites are going to get deceitful. [Max Planck Institut Informatik]