Tuesday 15 February 2011

Open Virtual Reality journal article published

An article I have co-authored with colleagues from a number of other Universities has now been published at the open access journal Open Virtual Reality, published by Bentham. The Open Virtual Reality Journal is an Open Access online journal which publishes research articles, reviews and letters/short communications in all areas of virtual reality.

Titled Prototyping Expressive 3D Virtual Worlds, the article has the following abstract; "3D virtual worlds are increasingly popular arenas for social interaction. There are new opportunities and possibilities for the style of communication but important aspects present in face-to-face meetings are absent in the artificial environment, including the visual cues of emotion that are provided by facial expressions, and a realistic representation of one’s geographical location. Our research attempts to enhance social interaction within virtual worlds by proposing a framework that would enable fully expressive Internet communication with the use of 3D expressive models. The framework contains three separate systems that support different aspects of social interaction within virtual worlds. Firstly, the Virtual City Maker creates a believable environment by automatically creating realistic identifiable geo-referenced 3D environments from a variety of aerial and GIS image data. Secondly, an automated 3D head modelling system provides a mechanism for generating and displaying expressions. Thirdly, the Emotion Analyser provides a mechanism for triggering the display of appropriate expressions by automatically identifying emotional words contained in text messages, the person to whom the emotional words refer to and the intensity. Each system in the framework is discussed with reference to their contribution to enhancing social interaction within 3D social worlds."

The article can be read here.

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