A tiny company in a rural area in Japan makes super-realistic masks that are in great demand in the entertainment and home technology industries and are in demand not only at home, but also abroad, for example, in Saudi Arabia.
How alive
The super-realistic masks costing 300,000 yen (about $ 2,650) are made by five employees of the tiny company REAL-f Co. They try to make each product as similar as possible to the face of a particular person, reproducing all the wrinkles and texture of the skin.
The founder of the company, Osamu Kitagawa, says that the idea of creating super-realistic masks came to him while he was working in a print shop.
However, it took him two more years after the decision to create masks to develop a process technology with a three-dimensional image of the face in high resolution and transferring the smallest features of the human face in masks. In 2011, he started selling his products.
The company, based in western Shiga prefecture, now receives about a hundred orders a year from entertainment, automotive, technical and security companies, mostly Japanese.
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For example, one Japanese car company ordered a mask depicting the face of a sleeping person to train artificial intelligence and teach it to understand when the driver dozed off at the wheel.
Kitagawa notes that he would not like to see masks of his work used for illegal purposes, and therefore he always tries to learn more about the client and work with trusted enterprises. But he does not exclude the possibility that someone will try to use his products for personal gain.
Author: Madina Kemova
