Sean Hodgins has come up with the perfect solution for anyone struggling to choose just one costume for Halloween. He designed and engineered a face-changing projection mask that allows you to disguise yourself as anyone or anything—at least until the battery in your back pocket runs out.
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As costumes go, this one is relatively simple as it’s based around a 3D-printed low-poly white plastic mask that’s worn with the help of a welder’s head strap and finished off with a black hoodie and black pants. Where things get a little more complicated is the projector rig that hangs off a short arm that extends from the bottom of the mask.
You can get tiny pico projectors that are no larger than a deck of cards these days, but you need to feed them something to actually project. Instead of trying to cram a laptop in his pants, Hodgins used a Raspberry Pi for playing back videos off a memory card that was connected directly to the tiny projector using a custom circuit board he created. So, yeah, you’ll need a solid understanding of electronics, soldering, and programming to pull this off.
Because the projector was designed to hang below the mask and project onto it from a low angle, Hodgins had to skew and stretch some of the video footage he intended to use, including faces, so that they didn’t look warped once they appeared on the mask. The results might not be photorealistic, but it’s a really neat effect that should make Hodgins popular around the Halloween holiday party circuit, and, as an added bonus, immune to facial recognition cameras.