Creating and sharing knowledge for telecommunications

Project: FACE EXPRESS

Acronym: FACE EXPRESS
Main Objective:
''Face Express'' is a one year project that extends the technology developed in the LIFEisGAME project funded by FCT UT Austin | Portugal Program. It targets young children and their families that are customers of Meo Kids. Children will learn by drawing through an interactive devise, how to express and recognize their emotions.
The ''Face Express'' project shows how it is possible to teach children how to recognize facial emotions, using real-time synthesis and automatic facial expression analysis. Our interactive digital media solution, MEO Box and Kinect and/or similar, has an explicit and carefully throught-out educational purpose: to help improve the children’s communication skills and learn to recognize emotions in a fun way and without inducing stress.
The overall technological objective is to deploy a low cost real-time facial animation system embedded in a game, which can be used by everyone in the family in a social, educational and leisure environment.
By the end of this project we would have carried out research leading to the following objectives:
O1. To deploy a facial motion capture system that uses low cost hardware.
O2. To provide a general methodology to create a facial expression analyzer and classifier system that will serve as a basis for the game score engine.
O3. To explore different interaction models to define the most adequate tangible user interface to allow an immersive behaviour when interacting with the children. We will extend our sketching technique.
O4. To study, validate and propose a novel game concept that will improve social and communication skills by training interpersonal awareness through a playful game.
O5. To realize and evaluate a prototype game with the proposed platform.
O6. To disseminate results to the public and to the scientific community.

Reference: PT-Inov.Face Express
Funding: PT Inovação, FCT, UT Austin
Start Date: 01-03-2012
End Date: 01-03-2013
Team: Veronica Costa Teixeira Pinto Orvalho
Groups: Computer Graphics and Interactive Multimedia - Po
Partners: Portugal Telecom, University os Texas at Austin (UTA)
Local Coordinator: Veronica Costa Teixeira Pinto Orvalho
Links: http://www.portointeractivecenter.org/site/?page_id=37
Internal Page

Associated Publications