Socially Communicative Characters for Interactive Applications

Modern multimedia presentations are aggregations of objects with different types such as video and audio. Due to the importance of facial actions and expressions in verbal and non-verbal communication, the authors have proposed “face multimedia object” as a new higher-level media type that encapsulates all the requirements of facial animation for a face-based multimedia presentations within one single object. In this paper, Interactive Face Animation Comprehensive Environment (iFACE) is described a general-purpose software framework that implements the “face multimedia object” and provides the related functionality and tools for a variety of interactive applications such as games and online services. iFACE exposes programming interfaces and provides authoring and scripting tools to design a face object, define its behaviours, and animate it through static or interactive situations. The framework is based on four parameterized spaces of Geometry, Mood, Personality, and Knowledge that together form the appearance and behaviour of the face. iFACE can function as a common “face engine” for design and run-time environments to simplify the work of content and software developers.