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NECA Project
The NECA Project (Net Environment for Embodied Emotional Conversational Agents) was a research project that focused on multimodal communication with animated agents in a virtual world. NECA was funded by the European Commission from 1998–2002 and the research results were published up to 2005.Brigitte Krenn, et al. ''Lifelike Agents for the Internet'' in "Agent culture: human-agent interaction in a multicultural world" edited by Sabine Payr, Robert Trappl 2004 pages 197-228Brigitte Krenn and Barbara Neumayr ''Incorporating animated conversation into a web-based Community Building Tool'' in "Intelligent virtual agents: 4th International Workshop, IVA 2003", edited by Thomas Rist pages 18-22 The project focused on communication between animated agents in a virtual world, using characters that exhibit realistic personality traits and natural looking behavior that reflects the emotional features of conversations. The project goal was to combine different research efforts such as ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Multimodal Interaction
Multimodal interaction provides the user with multiple modes of interacting with a system. A multimodal interface provides several distinct tools for input and output of data. Introduction Multimodal human-computer interaction refers to the "interaction with the virtual and physical environment through natural modes of communication", This implies that multimodal interaction enables a more free and natural communication, interfacing users with automated systems in both input and output. Specifically, multimodal systems can offer a flexible, efficient and usable environment allowing users to interact through input modalities, such as speech, handwriting, hand gesture and gaze, and to receive information by the system through output modalities, such as speech synthesis, smart graphics and other modalities, opportunely combined. Then a multimodal system has to recognize the inputs from the different modalities combining them according to temporal and contextual constraintsCasche ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Intonation (linguistics)
In linguistics, intonation is variation in pitch used to indicate the speaker's attitudes and emotions, to highlight or focus an expression, to signal the illocutionary act performed by a sentence, or to regulate the flow of discourse. For example, the English question "Does Maria speak Spanish or French?" is interpreted as a yes-or-no question when it is uttered with a single rising intonation contour, but is interpreted as an alternative question when uttered with a rising contour on "Spanish" and a falling contour on "French". Although intonation is primarily a matter of pitch variation, its effects almost always work hand-in-hand with other prosodic features. Intonation is distinct from tone, the phenomenon where pitch is used to distinguish words (as in Mandarin) or to mark grammatical features (as in Kinyarwanda). Transcription Most transcription conventions have been devised for describing one particular accent or language, and the specific conventions therefore need t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Virtual Actor
A virtual human, virtual persona, or digital clone is the creation or re-creation of a human being in image and voice using computer-generated imagery and sound, that is often indistinguishable from the real actor. The idea of a virtual actor was first portrayed in the 1981 film ''Looker'', wherein models had their bodies scanned digitally to create 3D computer generated images of the models, and then animating said images for use in TV commercials. Two 1992 books used this concept: ''Fools'' by Pat Cadigan, and ''Et Tu, Babe'' by Mark Leyner. In general, virtual humans employed in movies are known as synthespians, virtual actors, vactors, cyberstars, or "silicentric" actors. There are several legal ramifications for the digital cloning of human actors, relating to copyright and personality rights. People who have already been digitally cloned as simulations include Bill Clinton, Marilyn Monroe, Fred Astaire, Ed Sullivan, Elvis Presley, Bruce Lee, Audrey Hepburn, Anna Marie Go ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Interactive Multimodal Information Management (IM2)
Across the many fields concerned with interactivity, including information science, computer science, human-computer interaction, communication, and industrial design, there is little agreement over the meaning of the term "interactivity", but most definitions are related to interaction between users and computers and other machines through a user interface. Interactivity can however also refer to interaction between people. It nevertheless usually refers to interaction between people and computers – and sometimes to interaction between computers – through software, hardware, and networks. Multiple views on interactivity exist. In the "contingency view" of interactivity, there are three levels: #Not interactive, when a message is not related to previous messages. #Reactive, when a message is related only to one immediately previous message. #Interactive, when a message is related to a number of previous messages and to the relationship between them. One body of research has ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
International Computer Science Institute
The International Computer Science Institute (ICSI) is an independent, non-profit research organization located in Berkeley, California, United States. Since its founding in 1988, ICSI has maintained an affiliation agreement with the University of California, Berkeley, where several of its members hold faculty appointments. Research areas ICSI's research activities include Internet architecture, network security, network routing, speech and speaker recognition, spoken and text-based natural language processing, computer vision, multimedia, privacy and biological system modeling. Research groups and leaders * The Institute's director iDr. Lea Shanley * SIGCOMM Award winner Professor Scott Shenker, one of thmost-cited authors in computer science is the Chief Scientist and head of the New Initiatives group. * SIGCOMM Award winner Professor Vern Paxson, who leads network security efforts and who previously chaired the Internet Research Task Force. * Professor Jerry Feldman is the h ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Humanoid Animation
Humanoid Animation (HAnim) is an approved ISO and IEC standard for humanoid modeling and animation. HAnim defines a specification for defining interchangeable human figures so that those characters can be used across a variety of 3D games and simulation environments. The HAnim Standard was developed in the late 1990s and was significantly influenced by the Jack human modeling system and the research of experts in the graphics, ergonomics, simulation & gaming industry. See also * Rich Representation Language * X3D * VRML Software Bitmanagement Software ContactVRML/X3D Browser ExitRealityVRML/X3D Freeware Browser * Flux Player, VRML/X3D Freeware Browser * Flux Studio, VRML/X3D Freeware Modeler. Exports H-Anim * Seamless3d Seamless3d is an open-source 3D modeling software available under the MIT license. The models for the virtual reality world Techuelife Island were created using Seamless3d technology. Techuelife Island is showcased by Blaxxun as an example of wha ..., Open S ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Facial Action Coding System
The Facial Action Coding System (FACS) is a system to taxonomize human facial movements by their appearance on the face, based on a system originally developed by a Swedish anatomist named Carl-Herman Hjortsjö. It was later adopted by Paul Ekman and Wallace V. Friesen, and published in 1978. Ekman, Friesen, and Joseph C. Hager published a significant update to FACS in 2002. Movements of individual facial muscles are encoded by the FACS from slight different instant changes in facial appearance. It is a common standard to systematically categorize the physical expression of emotions, and it has proven useful to psychologists and to animators. Due to subjectivity and time consumption issues, the FACS has been established as a computed automated system that detects faces in videos, extracts the geometrical features of the faces, and then produces temporal profiles of each facial movement. Uses Using the FACS human coders can manually code nearly any anatomically possible facial ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Context (language Use)
In semiotics, linguistics, sociology and anthropology, context refers to those objects or entities which surround a ''focal event'', in these disciplines typically a communicative event, of some kind. Context is "a frame that surrounds the event and provides resources for its appropriate interpretation". It is thus a relative concept, only definable with respect to some focal event within a frame, not independently of that frame. In linguistics In the 19th century, it was debated whether the most fundamental principle in language was contextuality or compositionality, and compositionality was usually preferred.Janssen, T. M. (2012) Compositionality: Its historic context', in M. Werning, W. Hinzen, & E. Machery (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of compositionality', pp. 19-46, Oxford University Press. Verbal context refers to the text or speech surrounding an expression (word, sentence, or speech act). Verbal context influences the way an expression is understood; hence the norm of no ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Nonverbal Communication
Nonverbal communication (NVC) is the transmission of messages or signals through a nonverbal platform such as eye contact, facial expressions, gestures, Posture (psychology), posture, and body language. It includes the use of social cues, kinesics, distance (proxemics) and physical environments/appearance, of voice (paralanguage) and of touch (Haptic communication, haptics). A signal has three different parts to it, including the basic signal, what the signal is trying to convey, and how it is interpreted. These signals that are transmitted to the receiver depend highly on the knowledge and empathy that this individual has. It can also include the use of time (chronemics) and eye contact and the actions of looking while talking and listening, frequency of glances, patterns of fixation, pupil dilation, and blink rate (oculesics). The study of nonverbal communication started in 1872 with the publication of ''The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals'' by Charles Darwin. Dar ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Skeletal Animation
Skeletal animation or rigging is a technique in computer animation in which a character (or other articulated object) is represented in two parts: a surface representation used to draw the character (called the ''mesh'' or ''skin'') and a hierarchical set of interconnected parts (called ''bones'', and collectively forming the ''skeleton'' or ''rig''), a virtual armature used to animate (''pose'' and ''keyframe'') the mesh. While this technique is often used to animate humans and other organic figures, it only serves to make the animation process more intuitive, and the same technique can be used to control the deformation of any object—such as a door, a spoon, a building, or a galaxy. When the animated object is more general than, for example, a humanoid character, the set of "bones" may not be hierarchical or interconnected, but simply represent a higher-level description of the motion of the part of mesh it is influencing. The technique was introduced in 1988 by Nadia Magnen ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Computer Facial Animation
Computer facial animation is primarily an area of computer graphics that encapsulates methods and techniques for generating and animating images or models of a character face. The character can be a human, a humanoid, an animal, a legendary creature or character, etc. Due to its subject and output type, it is also related to many other scientific and artistic fields from psychology to traditional animation. The importance of face, human faces in communication, verbal and non-verbal communication and advances in Graphics processing unit, computer graphics hardware and software have caused considerable scientific, technological, and artistic interests in computer facial animation. Although development of computer graphics methods for facial animation started in the early-1970s, major achievements in this field are more recent and happened since the late 1980s. The body of work around computer facial animation can be divided into two main areas: techniques to generate animation data, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Rich Representation Language
The Rich Representation Language, often abbreviated as RRL, is a computer animation language specifically designed to facilitate the interaction of two or more animated characters.Intelligent virtual agents: 6th international working conference'' by Jonathan Matthew Gratch 2006 page 221P. Piwek, et al. ''RRL: A Rich Representation Language for the Description of Agent Behaviour'' in "Proceedings of the AAMAS-02 Workshop on Embodied conversational agents", July 16, 2002, Bologna, Italy. The research effort was funded by the European Commission as part of the NECA Project. The NECA (Net Environment for Embodied Emotional Conversational Agents) framework within which RRL was developed was not oriented towards the animation of movies, but the creation of intelligent "virtual characters" that interact within a virtual world and hold conversations with emotional content, coupled with suitable facial expressions. RRL was a pioneering research effort which influenced the design of other la ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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