Real-Time Facial Animation for Avatars in Collaborative Virtual Environments
Dennis Burford · 2000
Collaborative virtual environments (CVE’s) provide opportunities for interaction, communication and cooperation between participants at different physical locations. For CVE’s to be effective, participants must feel that they are present in the virtual environment. It has been postulated that avatars (virtual representations) using body-like figures increase presence. We outline a system for providing real-time facial animation for avatars in CVE’s. The system shall use a performer driven approach, with fiducials providing facial feature tracking. We hypothesize that this system will increase personal and group presence, and lead to a greater emotional investment in group interaction. 1 VIRTUAL ENVIRON-MENTS AND PRES-ENCE The construction of virtual spaces within a computer system has been possible for some time. These virtual environments (VE’s) have been used for a variety of applications, the most common being data visualisation, architectural walkthroughs,