SONG: Portals of next generation

• Research unit: EU RFP
• Project number: 99.0676-1

Key words (English)

Virtual worlds; advanced media representation; multi-user environments; intelligent agents;
simulation and data visualisation; e-commerce applications

Alternative project number (English)

EU project number: IST-1999-10192

Research programs (English)

EU-programme: 5. Frame Research Programme - 1.2.4 Essential technologies and infrastructures

Short description (English)

See abstract

Partners and International Organizations (English)

Coordinator: France Telecom CNET (F)

Abstract (English)

Typical services offered by portals include directory of resources, search facility, news, e-mail, phone, map information, and sometimes a community forum. These services generally rely on point-and-click on structured information like characters, still pictures or 2D graphics. The project intends to investigate, develop and standardise the building blocks for the next generation of portals. These building blocks include 3D computer graphics elements; intelligent agents embodied in realistic avatars, new user-friendly interfaces and real-time audio-visual communications. The project will demonstrate integration of the new technologies in a sample e-commerce application.
MIRALab's main task in the project is divided into three main parts.
1. Content Creation : Plugin development for 3DStudioMax platform to create MPEG4 compatible faces and bodies and facial animation sequences: The first year concentrated on this task with partial fulfilment of the requirements. The face animation creation plugin is almost completed. With this plugin, it is possible to design static expressions using 66 low level MPEG-4 Facial Animation Parameters. The user is provided with all the interface to load, edit and save expressions on a default face model. Further, a variety of time varying evelopes can be applied to the expressions to generate key frame animations. Externally generated MPEG4 animation files can be loaded and edited. Preliminary versions of face creation, and body creation plugin are complete. It is possible to load generic face and body and interface has been designed and implemented to deform the generic face and body objects using MPEG4 parameters. The output can be saved in VRML in case of face and H-Anim format in case of bodies. The ongoing and future work include texture generation from photo input for face and exporting BodyDeftable for synthetic body.
2. Real Time Animation : MPEG4 facial animated in real time on the platform developed in the course of the project. The API was designed in cooperation with Blaxxun AG (WP2). The facial animation libraries were developed to handle MPEG4 face input and adapted for use on the SoNG platform. Face nodes in the MPEG4 scenegraph were implemented and preliminary results were obtained from locally stored MPEG4 animation files. Ongoing and future work is in the direction of animation from bitstreams.
Agent Behaviour : Agent specific facial expressions generation as a bank of MPEG4 Facial Animation Parameters. Preliminary version of the library was developed, containing six basic facial expressions and their combinations. This library essentially serves as a mapping between high level facial expressions and their low level representation. A script format was proposed in order to handle high level agent commands for facial expressions. The script defines various tracks for high facial expressions, phonemes, head movements and eye movements with corresponding time envelopes. Low level facial animation parameters will be extracted using this script and the library of FAPs.

References in databases (English)

Swiss Database: Euro-DB of the
State Secretariat for Education and Research
Hallwylstrasse 4
CH-3003 Berne, Switzerland
Tel. [phone]
Swiss Project-Number: 99.0676-1