Gestures news

Cantoche, a company that develops and distributes avatar SaaS products, announced today the release of Living Actor™ Assistant, a 100% online intuitive and low-cost tool that easily authors interactive talking animated avatars who automatically answer Web visitors’ questions. Living Actor™ Assistant enables small and middle size businesses to increase customer conversion rates while reducing their services costs through the use of conversational virtual assistants.

Highly expressive avatars presented on the video are used by Vcom3D in teaching Arabic as well as culturally appropriate gestures and behaviors useful when interacting with people from Arabic countries. Developed in cooperation with Advanced Distributed Learning Co-Laboratory for military and civilian personnel working in Iraq and Afghanistan, 3D Serious Game constitutes dynamic learning environment with embodied conversational agents that feature voice, text and gestural information.

The AVATAR kiosk as being developed by The University of Arizona, is an interactive screening technology which assists law enforcement at border crossings and airports to detect lies and other deceptive behaviours.

When individuals approach the kiosk, they scan their identification, and it detects pupil changes down in the millimetre level and asks a few questions. Border control would step in to work directly with individuals whose behavior is suspicious as flagged by the AVATAR Kiosk.

Imagine a TV that responds to your physical behaviour such as finger pointing, talking and other actions such as picking up a magazine. Basically, it is a TV that watches you via gesture recognition, voice recognition and image recognition and responds accordingly.

Just wondering why I have never written about Milo, a virtual agent, conversational avatar, chatbot responding to voice, face and gestures. Very cool presentation.

Steve Di Paola of the Simon Fraser University demonstrated a virtual agent system to Chatbots.org.  This system interprets real time emotions in input such as voice, and shows facial expressions and gestures.

During the 9th International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents (related to IVA Gala), Steve showed us how his parameterized facial animation system operates. His goal is to develop a system that can handle any face type, behavior, and voice to be used in games, movies and virtual agent worlds. Their current focus is on how emotions should be expressed.

In the first few minutes of the video, he demonstrated various types of faces. Steve grabbed his microphone and started talking. The avatar spoke similar to Steve and his (or her) lips were synchronized with his words. As soon as Steve raised or changed his voice, the avatar acted correspondingly, which was absolutely amazing. It widened its mouth when talking louder; it moved its eyebrow to emphasize what it was saying, and it responded to a drumming sound. Wow!

More explanation and images after break.