Archive notice: This article was originally published on 10 July 2020. It has been translated into English and lightly edited for clarity while preserving its historical context.
Epic Games released Live Link Face for iOS to stream high-resolution facial animation from an iPhone directly to a character in Unreal Engine. The app used the iPhone’s TrueDepth front camera and Apple ARKit to capture an actor’s performance.
Live Link carried the facial data over a network connection. For distributed virtual-production teams, the app also supported timecode workflows, including integration with Tentacle Sync hardware over Bluetooth and a stage master clock. Epic positioned the frame-accurate timecode support as a way to align facial capture with cameras and body motion capture.
The app became available on the App Store on 8 July 2020. Epic also published an announcement and setup documentation. Teams should test network reliability, device compatibility and timecode alignment before using the archived workflow in production.
