An extravagant new feature for Star Citizen was shown by Studio Cloud Imperium Games at gamescom. With the Faceware technology, your facial movements are transferred to your character. Using a webcam and the newly developed facial motion sensor, the program scans your face and places a virtual grid of marking points over it. Based on your facial expressions and the movements of your face, the player avatar is animated accordingly in the game.

Live transmission of your facial expressions in Star Citizen

This means that other players can not only hear your voice during conversations in Star Citizen, but also see an image of your facial expressions. If you consider how important body language and facial expressions are in communication, even if a lot is only perceived subconsciously, this is an extremely interesting innovation. There was also some news for the voice broadcast. The player's voice should only be audible within a certain radius around his figure and also be reproduced spatially accurately via 3D sound. If the character is wearing a helmet, appropriate filters ensure that the voice sounds accordingly.

There are also new possibilities in a playful way, for example the Faceware program recognizes your head position and thus your perspective. So if you are sitting in the cockpit, you can move your head to change the angle instead of using the mouse.

When this feature will be implemented is still unknown. First up for Star Citizen is the long-awaited Alpha 3.0 patch. In this update, new planetary landings, the first part of the revised item system and the cargo system will be implemented.

The expected release date for Alpha Patch 3.0 is early September. As experience shows, such appointments are not set in stone at Star Citizen, but are more often subject to delays. You can find the video about the Faceware function and the special hardware at the beginning of the article.