Emotion representation for virtual environments
AbwaclResearch on networked applications that utilize multimodal information about their users' current emotional state a re presently a t the forefront of interest of the computer vision a n d artificial intelligence communities. Human faces may act as visual interfaces that help users feel at home when interacting with a computer because they a re accepted as the most expressive means for communicating and recognizing emotions. Thus, a lifelike human face can enhance interactive applications by providing straightforward feedback to and from the users and stimulating emotional responses f rom them. Thus, virtual environments can employ believable, expressive characters since such features significantly enhance the atmosphere of a virtual world and Communicate messages f a r more vividly than any textual or speech information. In this paper, we present an abstract means of description of facial expressions, by utilizing concepts included in the MPEG-4 standard. Furthermore, we exploit these concepts to synthesize a wide variety of expressions using a reduced representation, suitable for networked and lightweight applications.