Face to Face Communications in Multiplayer Online Games: A Real-Time System

Multiplayer online games (MOG) bring HCI into a new era of human-human interactions in computer world. Although current MOG provide more interactivity and social interaction in the virtual world, natural facial expression as a key factor in emulating face to face communications has been neglected by game designers. In this work, we propose a real-time automatic system to recognize players' facial expressions, so that the recognition results can be used to drive the MOG's "facial expression engine" instead of "text commands". Our major contributions are the evaluation, improvement and efficient implementation of existing algorithms to build a real-time system that meets the requirements specifically imposed by MOGs. In particular, we use a smaller number of fixed facial landmarks based on our evaluation to reduce the computational load with little degradation of the recognition performance.

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