Generation of Arm-gesture and Facial Expression for Intelligent Avatar Communications on the Internet

Recently the sign-language communication systems between avatars of different languages have been investigated as a means of overcoming the linguistic barrier. In the systems, an intelligent communication method has been employed, where sets of the animation parameters such as the joint angles of the gesture were transmitted instead of sending the entire-real motion pictures. However, the communication has been done based on the gesture only without considering the facial expression. In this paper we propose an approach to the communication based on the facial expression as well as the arm-gesture, and generating them on various avatar models. To extract the parameters to be transmitted, three kinds of key-frame editors are employed using techniques of inverse kinematics and partial differential equations. In generating facial expression especially, the movements of the cheeks and the jaws as well as other facial components are also utilized. The preliminary results show a possibility that the method could be used as a useful means for avatar communications between different languages on the Internet cyberspace.