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For real time facial
animation on the web, following are the important requirements: 1). Easy installation:
like in most of the application, the virtual presenter is not the most important
attraction of the proposed services. For this, we would not use any plug-in and
the complete applet development (Shout3D rendering + deformation engine) is pure
java.
2). Visual quality:
in case of the virtual talking heads on the web looks and realism are of utmost
importance. In the case of the virtual cartoon-like character, we can be freer
to use artistic and exaggerated deformation. In either case the visual quality
must be good.
3). Fast download:
to reduce the delay of downloading model, we need to develop low resolution and
less complex model (e.g. use of compressed model from Shout3D) and compress the
size of data needed for animation (FAT). Some download sizes of files are described
later.
4). Real time interactivity:
our virtual presenter must be able to interact in different ways depending upon
the user. In this case, video streaming or preprocessing is not possible. Thus,
parameterized animation of the virtual presenter is of importance, and we choose
MPEG-4 FAP as these parameters. One example of this interactivity is under development
for the IST Interface project, where a Dialogue Manager, a TTS and a Phoneme/Bookmark
converter provide real time dialogue and animation. - Easy web integration: integration
of this applet in web pages should be easy and must allow communication between
the applet and the html pages. This communication, to select a model and some
visual parameters, uses JavaScript. The current implementation of the
MPEG-4 facial animation player through FAT is written completely in java and uses
the Shout3D rendering engine. This engine was developed in Java in order to simplify
the web integration (no plug-in is necessary). But, Shout3D provides two types
of rendering engines based on the same APIs. The first is pure java that can be
use without a plug-in installation, but the performance is linked with the complexity
of the models. To be able to use and animate most complex models, Shout3D also
provides a plug-in rendering engine based on OpenGL.
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