Personnages virtuels interactifs intelligents

Abstract - This paper addresses the problem of creating facial expression of mixed emotions in a perceptually valid way. The research has been done in the context of a “game-like” health and education applications aimed at studying social competency and facial expression awareness in autistic children as well as native language learning, but the results can be applied to many other applications such as games with need for dynamic facial expressions or tools for automating the creation of facial animations. Most existing methods for creating facial expressions of mixed emotions use operations like averaging to create the combined effect of two universal emotions. Such methods may be mathematically justifiable but are not necessarily valid from a perceptual point of view. The research reported here starts by user experiments aiming at understanding how people combine facial actions to express mixed emotions, and how the viewers perceive a set of facial actions in terms of underlying emotions. Using the results of these experiments and a three-dimensional emotion model, we associate facial actions to dimensions and regions in the emotion space, and create a facial expression based on the location of the mixed emotion in the three-dimensional space. We call these regionalized facial actions “facial expression units.

Abstract - In this paper, we describe a modular multi-dimensional parameter space for real-time face game-based animation. Faces are our most expressive communication tools. Therefore a synthetic facial creation and animation system should have its own tailored authoring environment rather than using general purpose tools from image, 2D and 3D animation. This environment would take advantage of a knowledge space of faces types, expressions, and behavior, encoding known facial knowledge and meaning into a comprehensive, intuitive facial language and set of user tools. Since faces and face expression work on so many cognitive levels, we propose a multi-dimension parameter space called FaceSpace as the basic face model, and a comprehensive authoring environment based on this model. We describe the underlying mechanisms of our environment, and also demonstrate its early game applications and content process.

Abstract - There has been a recent surge of novel interface devices available for home gaming systems. With the rise in popularity of games like Guitar Hero and consoles such as Nintendo’s Wii comes new opportunities for game design at the interface level. In this paper we propose three interrelated dimensions for the analysis of embodied and gestural game interface hardware devices. We demonstrate how gestural and embodied interactions can be understood as ludic, kinesthetic and narrative experiences. We ground this discussion in a close analysis of the interface affordances of the game Rock Band and demonstrate how these three dimensions allow us to understand more clearly the place of the interface in the design and the experience of games.