Instant Messenger with Personalized 3D Avatar
Yuangang Lu, Yun Sheng, Guixu Zhang · 2015
Instant Messengers (IM) have become popular online chat tools in cyber worlds. The existing IMs mainly rely on text, audio, and video for user conversation and communication. The pure text chat is monotonous, while the video chat only occurs when users have their webcoms installed and wish to see each other. In this paper, we propose a new IM with personalized 3D Avatars, and present a prototype of this system. Through our IM, the user can synthesize a personalized 3D avatar by just inputting a 2D self face image. Expressions of the avatar are synthesized by a group of predefined phonemes and visemes, and driven by a text-to-visual speech engine. Moreover, our system supports 3D avatar decoration. During online chat, text is input through the text-to-visual speech engine to drive the generation of voice and animation for the 3D avatar. Tests have demonstrated that our IM with personalized 3D avatars can enhance the fun and vividness of online chat experience.