Communicating with Virtual Humans

The face is a small part of a human, but it plays an essential role in cemmunication. An open hybrid system for facial animation is presented. It encapsulates a considerable amount of information regarding facial models, movements, expressions, emotions, and speech. The complex description of facial animation can be handled better by assigning multiple input accessories. These input accessories may be a simple script, a multi-input musical keyboard, a gesture dialogue from the DataGlove, or some other type of interactive physical or virtual device. Integration of all means of control offers flexibility and freedom to the animator. The scope of such an open system is tremendous. The system described is written in C with the interface built on top of the Fifth Dimension Toolkit. The various input components are independent processes running on UNIX workstations. Communication between the processes is done through sockets in stream mode using Internet protocol. A figure illustrates the system processes. (Contains 17 references.) (MAS) * Reproductions supplied by EDRS are the best that can be made * from the original document