Faces Everywhere: Towards Ubiquitous Production and Delivery of Face Animation

While face animation is still considered one of the toughest tasks in computer animation, its potential application range is rapidly moving from the classical field of film production into games, communications, news delivery and commerce. To support such novel applications, it is important to enable production and delivery of face animation on a wide range of platforms, from high-end animation systems to the web, game consoles and mobile phones. Our goal is to offer a framework of tools interconnected by standard formats and protocols and capable of supporting any imaginable application involving face animation with the desired level of animation quality, automatic production wherever it is possible, and delivery on a wide range of platforms. While this is clearly an ongoing task, we present the current state of development along with several case studies showing that a wide range of applications is already enabled.