Researchers at Disney Research Zurich, ETH Zurich, and the Max Planck Institute for Informatics have developed a simple method to digitize teeth.
The team can digitize teeth by studying a video of someone smiling, or merely a photograph or someone smiling.
The one drawback of using photographs is that some teeth remain hidden. However the researchers created a system that matches visible teeth to a catalog of existing tooth models, and then based on those matches, automatically fills in the rest of the teeth with appropriate sizes and shapes.
Applications for the new technology could include helping digitize teeth in an efficient manner for video games and movies.
