Creepy hyper-realistic masks are 'more believable than human faces'

Scientists have created creepy hyper-realistic masks, which they claim are 'more believable than human faces.’

The silicone masks were created by researchers from the University of York and University of Kyoto, and feature several human-like qualities, including freckles, wrinkles and hair.

To put them to the test, the researchers asked participants to look at pairs of photos and decide which showed a normal face, and which showed a person wearing a mask.

While you might think this sounds pretty easy, the results revealed that the participants were fooled by masks 20% of the time.

And according to the researchers, this error-rate would likely be much higher in real-life scenarios.

One of the hyper-realistic masks (University of York)

Dr Rob Jenkins, who worked on the study, explained: "In our study participants had several advantages over ordinary people in everyday life.

“We made it clear to participants that their task was to identify the mask in each pair of images and we showed them example masks before the test began.

"The real-world error rate is likely to be much higher because many people may not even be aware hyper-realistic masks exist and are unlikely to be looking out for them.

The masks feature several human-like qualities, including freckles, wrinkles and hair (University of York)

"The current generation of masks is very realistic indeed with most people struggling to tell an artificial face from the real thing.”

While this study was simply a bit of fun, the researchers warn that these hyper-realistic masks could have more serious consequences in the future.

Dr Jet Sanders, who worked on the study, said: "Failure to detect synthetic faces may have important implications for security and crime prevention as hyper-realistic masks may allow the key characteristics of a persons' appearance to be incorrectly identified.

The masks cost around £1,000 (University of York)

The team highlighted one recent case in which an international gang used a hyper-realistic mask to impersonate a French minister, defrauding business executives out of millions of pounds.

Dr Sanders added: "These masks currently cost around £1000 each and we expect them to become more widely used as advances in manufacturing make them more affordable."