Researchers at the University of Pittsburgh have developed Face Alive Icons, a software that can manipulate the picture of someone's face to show a range of emotions. Associated to an instant messenger like Skype or Windows Live Messenger, the smileys allow to change the chatter's face!

Once the user has uploaded a picture of himself with a neutral expression, he can warp the facial features by typing in common text symbols in his conversation ;)
Indeed, the picture is not sent with every smiley but a profile is stored the recipient device. This profile consists of a decomposition of the original photo. Every time the user sends an emoticon, the face is reassembled on the recipient's device in such a way as to show the appropriate expression.

To create the software, Li developed computational models for each type of expression using a learning program that analyzes the expressions stored in a database to identify features unique to each one.

At the moment, Face Alive Icons has been only incorporated into an application used for distance learning but we hope to use it also one day. More especially as Xin Li now works for Google. So what ? Google Talk ?


Source: TechnologyReview, tuesday.