Virtual avatar enhanced nonverbal communication from mobile phones to PCs

Abstract

Nonverbal communication is a special kind of communication using wordless messages such as gesture, body language, posture, facial expression and eye contact. Such communications are specially attractive in virtual environments (VEs) which incorporating 3D avatars. Many of techniques for nonverbal communication in VEs have been studied and reported. However, transferring existing techniques to mobile platform are seldom reported. In this paper, we introduce our approach of creating a nonverbal communication environment between mobile phone and normal PCs. 3D face modeling is taken as an example to explain the system architecture. This modeling process is integrated with 3 platforms. The prior knowledge of modeling only uses one front view image which can be captured by built-in phone camera without high quality constrain. The two ends,between phone to phone or phone to PC, can download models from server and share the communication environment. Key techniques such as facial features detecting, face model personalizing are presented and experiment results show a lifelike face-to-face conversation can be simulated. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.