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Smilie-mail: An Avatar-based Asynchronous Messaging System
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  Links| Papers | Updates | Software Releases | Ads by Yahoo and others | Definitions | Bibliography |
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Some of the areas covered in this research were emotion, ECA, autonomous agents and Computer Animation. The Smiley Messenger enables you to send multimedia content to your friends by just typing the text and adding tags to it! A short movie of a smiley is generated, and both you and your friend are notified once the processing of the message is complete. A short tutorial is offered on the website. You can click here for a demo of the output of the Smiley Messenger. Two message formats are offered, a movie and an animated GIF. |
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What are Smilies? Internet Smilies (also known as emoticons are used to represent emotions in e-mails and newsgroup postings in an attempt to overcome the textual impersonality of the Internet. In particular, smilies are most often used to signal the use of humor and irony, which can be lost in online communication. The most common smiley is comprised of a colon, a hyphen and a closing bracket -- :-)... (http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/cyber/fullglos.html) Internet users can also express how they feel by using small images of faces. The faces can be animated GIF images  or just static faces  , i.e. images that do not change.
These were the desired outcomes of the research There are a number of desired outcomes from the research. A few of them are listed below: 1. The production of eye pleasing smilies. Why pleasing? Smilies that are well designed, are more likely to engage the user while the user is interacting with the 'System'. 2. Be able to generate smilies that can produce or present a desired emotion. 2. To gain an understanding of how to achieve different types of emotion on a cartoon face. The fact that the faces to be animated are not human faces 3. The production of animated smilies as GIF images and shot MPEG movies. 4. To gain knowledge in the area of MPEG-4 and VHML. 5. The production of a System that allows users to send and receive personalized (formatted using VHML tags) messages. 6. The production of a feedback component that will be used to access the effectiveness of the System. 7. The System should be interesting and engaging. Research Areas Facial Animation VHML MPEG-4 Links VHML - http://www.vhml.org/ MPEG-4 - http://www.chiariglione.org/mpeg/index.htm Computing at Curtin - http://computing.edu.au Smiley Central - http://www.smileycentral.com Clicksmilies - http://www.clicksmilies.com/ famous3D - http://www.famous3d.com Supervisor Andrew Marriott - http://computing.edu.au/~raytrace Software Releases Spikky Application (version 0.1) Other Resources cs451_presentation.ppt honours_presentation.ppt Updates 27/09/2005 Smiley Text Messenger Demo 19/09/2005 Created first AVI movie - 1.7M 18/09/2005 Add the openday images Click here to view OpenDay images 18/09/2005 Created first GIF file from the TalkingHead application, file size 13M 5/08/2005 The first Blah movie played in a Java Media Player (Java Plug-in needed) 2/08/2005 The first Blah movie (QuickTime plug-in needed) 1/08/2005 Breakthrough in creating animated Eyes 
19/07/2005 Created a Smiley that can actually smile (: 19/07/2005 My Second Smiley face 13/07/2005 My first Smiley face 8/05/2005 Spikky Application (version 0.1) release 18/05/2005 Made major corrections to Bibliography 8/05/2005 Completed and added Spikky Application (version 0.1) 28/04/2005 Added Bibliography section 20/04/2005 Updated ads section 15/04/2005 Added the Definition section 30/03/2005 Added Ads by Yahoo page 10/03/2005 Edited the project outcomes section. 9/03/2005 Initial web site design. Web site to be updated as research progresses. |
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