Epic acquires company for technology that synchronizes facial expression

Epic Games has acquired Hyprsense, a company specializing in technology that synchronizes people’s facial expressions with those of virtual characters in real time. The technology comes to the Unreal Engine.

Epic Games has acquired Hyprsense, among other things, to expand the possibilities of the Unreal Engine to create characters. Hyprsense employees will work closely with the development teams at Epic, 3Lateral and Cubic Motion to give developers more tools for building game characters, the Hyprsense site says.

The acquisition is in line with Epic’s previous acquisitions to obtain game character technology. Last year, Epic took over Serbian 3Lateral. That company develops technology to create virtual models that look like realistic people. At the beginning of this year, the takeover of the British Cubic Motion, which specializes in animations of real-looking facial expressions of digital characters, followed.

Hyprsense introduced a test version of its Hyprmeet app for Zoom, Discord and OBS in September. This allowed users to deploy an avatar for video calls, with facial expressions following that of the user. According to Hyprsense, no specialized technology is required and syncing works with a simple webcam. The app is no longer available.

The company’s technology can detect fifty facial expressions and provides tracking for the eyes and tongue. The company’s Hyprface SDK has a size of 15MB and can track at up to 300fps when using a system with an Intel Core i9 processor.

Hyprsense was founded in 2015 and initially focused on facial tracking for VR headsets, but gradually the company focused more on the use of 2d cameras from smartphones and PCs. An acquisition amount has not been disclosed.