A Framework for the Development of Online, Location-Specific, Expressive 3D Social Worlds

Today social networking sites are emerging as increasingly popular communication spaces where one can see and talk to friends and acquaintances. However, these sites require different methods of offering the additional information that are often useful or essential in human interaction such as, the conveyance of emotion or a realistic representation of one’s geographical or urban location. Our research concentrates on addressing these issues by offering fully expressive Internet communication with the use of 3D expressive models to help provide some of the visual cues that are present in face-to-face interaction. This is achieved via an innovative piece of software called Emotion Analyser that analyses text messages in the Internet communication environment. Moreover, a dedicated 3D facial animation system has been generated that interfaces with the Emotion Analyser in order to translate its output. Finally, the 3D virtual city models for the final interactive virtual world have been produced by using our own semi-automatic urban modeling system called Virtual City Maker.