  We introduce VOODOO XP: a 3D-aware one-shot head reenactment method that can
generate highly expressive facial expressions from any input driver video and a
single 2D portrait. Our solution is real-time, view-consistent, and can be
instantly used without calibration or fine-tuning. We demonstrate our solution
on a monocular video setting and an end-to-end VR telepresence system for
two-way communication. Compared to 2D head reenactment methods, 3D-aware
approaches aim to preserve the identity of the subject and ensure
view-consistent facial geometry for novel camera poses, which makes them
suitable for immersive applications. While various facial disentanglement
techniques have been introduced, cutting-edge 3D-aware neural reenactment
techniques still lack expressiveness and fail to reproduce complex and
fine-scale facial expressions. We present a novel cross-reenactment
architecture that directly transfers the driver's facial expressions to
transformer blocks of the input source's 3D lifting module. We show that highly
effective disentanglement is possible using an innovative multi-stage
self-supervision approach, which is based on a coarse-to-fine strategy,
combined with an explicit face neutralization and 3D lifted frontalization
during its initial training stage. We further integrate our novel head
reenactment solution into an accessible high-fidelity VR telepresence system,
where any person can instantly build a personalized neural head avatar from any
photo and bring it to life using the headset. We demonstrate state-of-the-art
performance in terms of expressiveness and likeness preservation on a large set
of diverse subjects and capture conditions.
