This week in my new job (which is why I haven't been posting as much), I've been grappling with creating a Second Life avatar for business use. In an exploration of persona in a virtual space, all of us maintain avatars that look as close as possible to our "real life" faces. We do this with a combination of shaping a Second Life avatar head using the in-world tools, together with the creation of a custom texture in photoshop which is then applied on top of our "skin".

Above, you can see the results after a few hours work. Not perfect but close enough. But as I was endlessly tweaking, I wished there was a much easier way of doing it. Which is why this video from YouTube intrigued me so much - an experimental system that can take a regular photograph, and from it create a pretty realistic 3D avatar. Pretty cool...