We present a system which consists of a lifelike agent animated in real-time using video and audio analysis from the user. This kind of system could be used for Instant Messaging where an avatar controlled like a puppet is displayed instead of the webcam flow. The overall system is made of video analysis based on Active Appearance Models and audio analysis based on Hidden Markov Model. The para...

BACKGROUND Health literacy is critical for understanding complex medical problems and necessary for the well being of the patient. Printed educational materials (PM) have limitations in explaining the dynamics of a disease process. Multimedia formats may be useful for enhancing the educational process. OBJECTIVE To evaluate whether a printed format or animation with commentary on a handheld p...

We present a method to automatically morph trajectories from one mechanical system into trajectories of another system with potentially very different dynamics. Our method relies on a mapping from the source system’s configuration space to that of the target system to create a desired trajectory for the target system. A projection operatorbased trajectory optimization finds a dynamically-admiss...

This paper presents an entertainment-oriented application for mobile service, which generates customized speech-driven 3D facial animation and delivers to end-user by MMS (Multimedia Messaging Service). Some important methods of this application are discussed, including the 3D facial model based on 3 photos, the 3D facial animation driven by speech or text on-line and the video format transform...

The MPEG-4 Face and Body Animation (FBA) specifications aims at standardizing an interchange format for specifying virtual face and body modeling and related animation parameters. The scene graph concept, the FBA nodes, semantics and representation of the animation parameters as well as compression and streaming capabilities are successively addressed. The compatibility between virtual characte...

Some research suggests infants display a tendency to judge others' prosocial behavior, and in particular, that infants show a strong preference for prosocial others. For example, data from one frequently cited and well-publicized study showed that, after watching a puppet show with three puppets, 74% of infants chose the puppet that "helped" rather than the puppet that "hindered" a third puppet...

Glove puppetry in Taiwan is a popular performing art. In this paper, we present a physically-based virtual glove puppet system which simulates the dynamics of glove puppet and allows user to interactively observe and manipulate the motion of the virtual puppet. With physics simulation techniques, we can generate realistic motion of the virtual puppet with highlevel inputs. In our system, the pu...