My face in a video game soon?

My fingers dig into the edges of the chair as I sit up, surrounded by 71 ultra-high-resolution cameras scrutinizing every feature, every wrinkle, every angle of my face.

Five minutes earlier, I arrived at the Sapiens Project office in Orchard Square, in Sheffield city center [northern England], to check in. Friendly staff greeted me and guided me behind the pink screens that reminded me of my rights, to a room where a manager handed me an iPad: inside, I found a waiver form, which I scanned, having already studied it on the website a few days earlier.

Reading some paragraphs still makes me a little uncomfortable:

“I waive any right, claim, or interest I may have to control the use of my image. I voluntarily and knowingly waive any legal right or prohibition regarding my biometric data.”

Then I'm taken to a private dressing room where I'm pampered and showered with compliments on my sweater, my hair, and my face. A woman grabs a gray tank top neatly folded from a pile and hands it to me before putting a wig cap under my head, tucking a few stray hairs into it with the tip of a comb. All that matters is my face. The rest is irrelevant.

It's time. A door I hadn't noticed slides open, and I step toward the chair. This is the point of no return. "Step back a little," an assistant instructs me. Suddenly, 71 camera shutters click sharply, and a millisecond later, my face is no longer mine.

Ten24 is the most interesting Sheffield company you've never heard of. Its clients include companies like Facebook, Apple, Boots pharmacy, and the UK's NHS. Pretty impressive for a company that only employs nine people.

His specialty: taking incredibly precise and detailed photos, primarily (but not exclusively) of human faces and bodies, to turn them into hyper-realistic 3D models. These models are used for a multitude of purposes, from overweight mannequins for anatomy classes to skin tone samples for makeup manufacturers.

Their main market, however, is the video game industry. There was a time when studios crafted their heroes from scratch. And no one would mistake the angular face of a 1990s video game character for that of a real person.

But today's gamers want hyperrealism, even seeing the lines on a palm and counting the eyebrow hairs on their character. But it would take a long time to create such realistic characters. Wouldn't it be easier to take ultra-detailed photos of real people?

This is exactly what Ten24 has been doing for seventeen years. The company was the first to invest in this type of technology, although others have since followed suit. Visiting its online store is a rather unsettling experience.

Rows of faces, all bald, follow one another – selling for £69.99 each [just over €80]. There are also “lots” of digital mannequins, almost naked. Not to mention a catalog of hands, feet, and teeth. These digital bodies can also be filtered by age, gender, or ethnicity.

The images in this public inventory are those of professional models.