Second Life VRW Viewer - Real Life emotions for Avatars
December 1, 2008 2:44 amWhen I wrote about Head & Feature tracking using Irrlicht and ARtoolkit a few months ago, we all agreed we wouldn’t see this coming to Second Life anywhere soon. We all were wrong, as now there is the ‘VR-WEAR SL head analysis viewer’. Get the custom viewer (<- page not working atm, go here), hook up your webcam and make sure you’re ‘well lit’ and start smiling! Or is it a bit more complicated than that?
Stating “IMMERSION + INTERACTIVITY = ENGAGEMENT”, the VR-Wear SL Head Analysis Viewer - I suggest a short name, maybe SLmime? - at the moment recognizes the following real life attitudes and projects them unto your avatar: a ‘yes’ oder ‘no’ head motion, looking surprised, a big smile and left/right head bending. The software, as still in beta stage, is very sensitive to proper light exposure and framing.
After downloading the Second Life VRW Viewer 0.99 beta 3 (available for both Mac and PC), unzip the file in your preferred location in your PC. Then simply launch the ‘SecondLife.exe’ at the root of the directory. Once you are logged into Second Life, simply open the Edit > Preferences tab. Navigate to the ‘webcam’ tab, and click ‘Enable webcam’ then ‘OK’. The viewer is now capturing your face motions and ‘mimicking’ them on your avatar.
An added bonus is that the VR-wear head motion analysis software is ‘open’. If you are developing and distributing open source applications under the GPL License, then you are free to use VR-WEAR mod under the GPL License. Happen to be fluent in c++ and/or got some experience with the OpenCV library and/or signal processing and want to join dev? Don’t hesitate say ‘hi!’ to the VR-wear developers.
Oh, and ‘presenter’ Alex has the cutest ‘big smile’:
I notified ‘Vista’ under ‘issues’ - as usual -, but am I so hoping I can try this out somewhere soon. (I just need to find the combination good daylight + cable internet connection + time.) In the mean while, I’ll just practise my ‘huge smile’ some more, which is not that hard, as I’m terribly excited about ‘SLmime’. ;) But I do wonder, what is the ‘tongue out’ button for?!!
8 Responses to “Second Life VRW Viewer - Real Life emotions for Avatars”
This sounds quite incredible, so I gave it a try. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to work at all on my iMac. While the viewer installs and the video calibrates, no head movements were reflected on my avatar. Oh well. Hopefully this will work in future releases.
i just gave it a try and it kinda worked….
i had to look batshit insane to smile and flail about to nod my head..
but the tilt left and right worked really well…to well sometimes
i naturally tilt my head to the right…so it looked like my ava had tics :D
anyway…really interesting tech
Fenoe, did the ’stick tongue out’ work? ArminasX reported “my avatar gives a silly smile when u start it, but that’s all” and iAlya just managed to let her avatar stick out her tongue. (Sadly enough, no snaps from the human during that attempt.)
(Above mentioned on Plurk)
when i was going throu random faces…..(before my face totally cramped up) my avatar stuck her tongue out twice…….but my expression irl was nowhere near that of my avatar.
making the avatar to smile was tricky…….try smiling with a mad openmouth grin….that worked for me. ^_^
I got as far tonight as to get my Acer’s Crystal Eye to be willing to ‘direct capture’ footage to YouTube, but my video screen in the VWR viewer still appears blank (err.. black actually) before & after calibration (which of course, it mentions it failed.)
More trying to get this to work tomorrow, but I get a feeling it might be Acer Drivers more than this Second Life client to blame. (As the default drivers failed at communicating without about everything but Skype. Tssss.)
I so want to test this! :(
First, love, love, looooove this!
Second, my avi either sticks out her tong ore looks suprised, no matter how big a smile i have on my rl face. Those are the only expressions i get. And they take a long time to come trough.
Any suggestions?
Hey Vint, thanks for the smile thing ;) and the cool review!
For those who are trying the software out, don’t hesitate to leave comment questions or feedback on the GetSatisfaction page ! http://getsatisfaction.com/vrwear
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