Synchronization of speech, facial expressions and body gestures is one of the most critical problems in realistic avatar animation in virtual environments. In this paper, we address this problem by proposing a new high-level animation language to describe avatar animation. The Avatar Markup Language (AML), based on XML, encapsulates the Text to Speech, Facial Animation and Body Animation in a u...

In this paper, we propose to endow a graphical representation of a user in Instant Messaging – an avatar – with the ability to recognize and to express emotions and to play social nonverbal behaviour, on the basis of textual affect sensing and interpretation of communicative functions conveyed by online conversations. The developed Affect Analysis Model integrated with Instant Messaging (IM) me...

The paper presents approaches to identifying realworld demographic attributes based on language use in the virtual world. We apply features developed from the classic literature on sociolinguistics and sound symbolism to data collected from virtual-world chat and avatar naming to determine participants’ age and gender. We also examine participants’ use of avatar names across virtual worlds and ...

We introduce the concept of Avatar problems that deal with situations where each entity has multiple copies or “avatars” and the solutions are constrained to use at most (or exactly) one of the avatars. The resulting set of problems show a surprising range of hardness characteristics and elicit a variety of algorithmic solutions. In particular, we show how to extend the concept of -kernels to f...

Body scanning systems and computerized avatars have been developing to offer consumers new options in apparel fit and virtual try-on.1,2 Consumers can create a personalized avatar by first selecting a programmed avatar whose measurements are closest to one’s own and choosing like personal features such as hair, skin color and eyes. Personalized avatars are being used in a variety of application...