Instead of just moving a source video’s lips and face, an artificial intelligence-powered system can create photorealistic videos in which people can sway, turn their heads, blink their eyes, and emote. Basically, everything that an actor does and says in an input video will be translated into the video being altered.

According to the research, which will be presented at the VR filmmaking conference SIGGRAPH in August, the team ran a number of tests comparing its new algorithm to existing means of manipulating lifelike videos and images, many of which have been at least partially developed by Facebook and Google. Their system outperformed all the others, and participants in an experiment struggled to determine whether or not the resulting videos were real.