Ilana (left) and Kaya. Digital images created by Alceu Baptistao

Kaya, Ilana, Dana and Marlene. They?ve got flawless skin, ravishing eyes, luscious lips and perfect jawlines. Their expression radiates confidence and a subtle coquettishness. And they?re ready to work anytime or anywhere ? ramps, movie studios or TV production floors. The only problem is that they aren?t humans. Rather, they are digitally created 3D animated models that don?t exist below the neck down. Morphed out of several composite faces of ?perfect? beauties, these lifelike characters ? showcased at ?Future Face? exhibition at London?s Science Museum ? explores the destiny of the human face. As cosmetic surgeons forge alliances with 3D animators, and digital morphs are all set to turn into reality, more and more people are ready to cast away the faces they are born with. Future Face poses a question before us: how long will our looks be shaped by genetics and biological evolution? Or, should we use new technologies to determine features, contours and shapes of our fac?

Already people in the US, Europe and Australia spend nearly a half billion dollars on cosmetic surgery annually and at least a million faces undergo some kind of enhancement. It is one of the most common reasons given by women (one out of 12 cosmetic surgery patients female) for non-property loans. Cheek- and chin-implants (for the augmentation of the face), collagen and fat injections (which enhance the lips or plump up sunken facial features), ear pin-back (which brings the ears closer to the head), eyelid tightening, face-lift or nose surgery etc. are most wanted at a cosmetic surgeon?s parlour.

The surgeons are yet to redesign an entire face or transplant a dead beauty?s face onto a living woman, but the current trend of copying celebrities ? most women ask for J-Lo?s cheeks and eyes while men look for Tom Cruise?s jawline and Brad Pitt?s lips ? have inspired surgeons to hire every sort of technology, from 3D optical scanners to sophisticated computer graphics to create tailor-made faces.

The Medical Imaging Group in the Medical Physics Department, University College London, has developed the 3D scanning tool. It enables surgeons to experiment on faces without actually touching them. ?It scans the patient's face and maps more than 50,000 coordinates to an accuracy of about half a millimetre,? says Alf Linney who has helped develop the machine. ?Then, by using computer graphics, the measurements are turned into a 3D model of the patient?s face.?

As in computer games, they interact with this model playing around with shapes it can be changed into. Linney has already tried his experiment on a French performance artiste called Orlan who believes people should be allowed to ?wear the faces they choose?. She has undergone plastic surgery several times to prove her point, to try and look like digital beauties made up of several classical images of beauty, Mona Lisa not excluded.

Though Orlan has gone a bit too far in her quest to look flawless, the show business consistently craves for ageless beauties. While actors or models vie for a picture-perfect face, fashion promoters or movie producers would rather go for a digital Miss Universe which would be at their beck and call ? minus frequent mood swings, notorious tantrums and regular demands for salary hikes.

Take Franz Cerami, an Italian fashion promoter who dreams of managing a bevy of virtual beauties that can pose under arclights, walk on ramps or feature in ads or movies at the flick of mouse anywhere, anytime. Cerami is the organiser of Miss Digital World beauty pageant in which the contestants are hundreds of computer graphic imageries (CGI) of pretty faces. ?Miss Digital Beauty is the search for a contemporary ideal of beauty seen through virtual reality,? says Cerami. Tto choose the most beautiful virtual woman in cyberspace, people can vote for their favourite contender (log on to www.missdigitalworld.com) until December.

Similar CGI technologies are now also being used to create virtual clones and digitally resurrect the dead. The haunting beauty of the Digital Marlene, displayed in the exhibition, has been created by the digital animator Daniel Robichaud for Virtual Celebrity Productions. More and more such digital cloning systems allow resurrected celebrity faces to be grafted onto contemporary actors? bodies: by using movements of a live actor to animate a digital look-alike, the dead celebrity can have a posthumous acting career. Virtual clones are created using the same basic technology that resurrects a dead face, though these appear more believable. They are generated using high-resolution 3D scans of live faces and are not limited to reanimation of existing 2D material. The technology uses 3D photography to first capture 3D models and process them to create an accurate depth map of the chosen subject. The map is then converted to a polygonal model and rendered with high-resolution texture maps. In short, the method tries to capture the complex layers of skin, the skin tone, eye movement and emotional expression to some extent. The technology can not only clone a person but also create a new character or a digital actor. Movie producers like Pixar, Sony and Disney have already introduced such digital actors with key roles in films.

future face: Elia lba’s Doll Heads (below) and simulation of a face transplant surgery

However, even the most talented CGI artist will admit that digital actors still don?t stand up to close scrutiny. Most moviemakers still prefer digital artistes in crowds, in distance shots. Since digital faces betray a kind of lifelessness or plasticity, some CGI artists are attempting to add a little bit of humane imperfections.

For instance, Brazilian artist Alceu Baptistao has added freckles, bushy eyebrows and slightly chipped teeth in his creation called Kaya (showed on the cover). Kaya is one of the most technologically perfect models who has already appeared on television adverts. But even Kaya is yet to master the subtle movements of muscles in the eyes or face. The best computer model fails to faithfully reproduce the complex anatomical interplay between bones, cartilage, muscles, nerves, blood vessels and tissue that gets activated during an innocent smile. More than 30 muscles are involved in facial movements ? it takes 17 muscles to simply smile.

If artists find it so difficult to recreate facial expressions and animators keep missing subtle nuances of a spontaneous smile, just imagine the challenges plastic surgeons are likely to face when they try to transplant an entire face. Surgeons will have to harvest an entire face from the donor?s body saving not just the skin ? from hairline to jawline and from ear to ear ? but also the mouth, lips, nose, eyelids, eyebrows, several muscles, nerves and other substructures.

Then they have to painstakingly reconnect all these structures to someone whose face has been completely disfigured by an accident. The graft will certainly evoke a severe immune reaction (the body enthusiastically rejects anything it perceives foreign) in the recipient?s body which has to be treated with strong immunosuppressive drugs as long as she lives.

A team of plastic surgeons based at the University of Louiseville in Kentucky, US, however, claim they are ready to accept the challenge. Last June the medical team asked the University?s ethical department whether they could go ahead with the world?s first full-face transplant ? of the kind applied on Nicolas Cage and John Travolta in the science fiction thriller Face/Off. The team claims having practised the complicated operation on faces of bodies donated for medical research. The results suggest that should a face be successfully transplanted the reconstructed face will not resemble the donor?s looks. In other words, the transplanted face will have a third identity after the surgery.

So the imminent face transplant at Louiseville not only raises ethical dilemmas but throws up several technical questions as well. Sceptics have inquired whether such a transplant would be worth the massive side-effects likely to be brought about by the strong anti-rejection drugs the patient will have to take throughout his or her life.

The Louiseville surgeons have rebutted the critics, pointing out that the surgery won?t be too different from transplants of hands, thighs or knees already achieved by surgeons in the US, Europe and Australia. To convince the opponents the team worked with New Scientist, a UK-based television company Mentorn and a UK animation company to perform a live ?virtual transplant?, stretching the facial skin of a virtual donor over the bone structure of a virtual patient. The surgery was telecast as a part of a documentary on the Discovery Health Channel in the US on May 28.

If everything goes well, the Louiseville surgeons will transplant a dead person?s face onto the disfigured body of some accident victim. But will the person be able to come to terms with a brand new identity? And will the new face be able to express her own emotions?

?If much of our communications of emotions depends on facial expression, there is certainly a relationship between facial movement and personality,? says Sandra Kemp, curator of the Future Face exhibition. Kemp, a research professor and director of Research at the Royal College of Art, London, has worked for five years on the project. She?s authored a book, Future Face, which was published when the exhibition opened on October 1.

According to her, it was Charles Darwin who first suggested that our expressions are innate rather than a learned behaviour. ?If we had to be taught to smile, everyone would do it differently,? says she. Darwin believed that our facial expressions are universal and they can be traced back to our common prehistoric ancestors or to our infancy, when they preformed some useful, instinctive function.

Even though these expressions have long ceased to be of any use, adults continue to perform them through habit whenever the feeling originally associated with the expression arises. Recent research by Paul Ekman, professor of psychology at the University of California Medical School, and others claim to have demonstrated that each individual face can make more than 10,000 expressions ? controlled by complex muscle movements. And even a seemingly innocent facial expression is related to an individual?s thought, feeling and consciousness.

It?s needless to say that even if plastic surgeons manage to transplant a face or reconstruct a face completely they won?t be able to recreate face capable of expressing all our emotions. Nor will any CGI artist successfully create any digital beauty which will emote human feelings accurately. So if you read between their lips, you won?t miss the waxen looks. And a careful scrutiny of the eyes will reveal a deadpan expression.