Supporting Ubiquitous Collaboration with Real-Time Facial Animation

Exchanging facial video is an efficient way for collaborative awareness. However, collaboration systems are migrating from the traditional circuit-switched environments and local-area-networks (LANs) to Internet and wireless networks. Video-based communication faces new challenges such as low bandwidth, limited computational power, etc. In this paper, we present the two dimensional (2D) facial animation, which is a new visual communication way to support expression awareness for mobile embedded sites. The related prototype system was developed and experiments were carried out. Results show that 2D facial animation provides novel visual communication to collaborative participants and improves emotion awareness in ubiquitous collaborative environment.

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