FaceSpace: A facial spatial domain toolkit

We will describe a visual development system for exploring face space, both in terms of facial types and animated expressions. Imagine an n-dimensional space describing every humanoid face, where each dimension represents a different facial characteristic. Within this continuous space, it would be possible to traverse a path from any face to any other face, morphing through faces along that path. It is also possible to combine elements of this space to create an expressive, emotive, talking 3D synthetic face of any given facial type. This development toolkit called FaceSpace is based on a hierarchical parametric approach to facial animation and creation. We present our early results on exploring a face space and describe our preliminary investigation of the perceptual and cultural relationships between different facial types; as well as creating an additive language of hierarchical expressions, emotions and lip-sync sequences by using combined elements of a facial domain

Knowledge based approach to modeling portrait painting methodology

Traditional portrait artists use a specific but open human vision methodology to create a painterly portrait of a live or photographed sitter. Portrait artists attempt to simplify, compose and leave out what is irrelevant, emphasizing what is important. While seemingly a qualitative pursuit, artists use known but open techniques such as relying on source tone over colour to indirect into a colour temperature model, using "sharpness" to create a centre of interest, using edges to move the viewers gaze, and other techniques to filter and emphasize. Our interdisciplinary work attempts to compile and incorporate this portrait painter knowledge into a multi-space parameterized system that can create an array of painterly rendering output

Exploring a Parameterized Portrait Painting Space

We overview our interdisciplinary work building parameterized knowledge domains and their authoring tools that allow for expression systems which move through a space of painterly portraiture. With new computational systems it is possible to conceptually dance, compose and paint in higher level conceptual spaces. We are interested in building art systems that support exploring these spaces and in particular report on our software-based artistic toolkit and resulting experiments using parameter spaces in face based new media portraiture. This system allows us to parameterize the open cognitive and vision-based methodology that human artists have intuitively evolved over centuries into a domain toolkit to explore aesthetic realizations and interdisciplinary questions about the act of portrait painting as well as the general creative process. These experiments and questions can be explored by traditional and new media artists, art historians, cognitive scientists and other scholars

Extending the range of facial types

We describe, in case study form, techniques to extend the range of facial types and movement using a parametric facial animation system originally developed to model and control synthetic 3D faces limited to a normal range of human shape and motion. These techniques have allowed us to create a single authoring system that can create and animate a wide range of facial types that range from realistic, stylized, cartoon-like, or a combination thereof, all from the same control system. Additionally we describe image processing and 3D deformation tools that allow for a greater range of facial types and facial animation output

Face, portrait, mask: The virtuality of the synthetic face

With new technological artistic tools that allow us to author 3D computer generated faces that can be as real or as abstract or as iconified as we choose, what aesthetic and cultural communication language do we elicit? Is it the historically rich language of the fine art portrait ? the abstracted artifact of the human face? What happens when this portrait animates, conveying lifelike human facial emotion ? does it cease to be a portrait and instead moves into the realm of embodied face ? when it begins to emote and feel and possibly react to the viewer? Is it then more in the language of the animated character, or as we make it photo-realistic, the language of the video actor with deep dramatic back-story or simply as real as a person on the other side of the screen? A viewer can not be rude to a portrait but can feel that they are being rude to an interactive character in an art installation. When does it become not an embodied face nor portrait but a mask ? the icon that speaks of face but is never embodied? Masks also have a deep cultural, historic and ethnic language far different than that of human faces or art portraits. More eastern compared to the western portrait. Iconized faces (i.e. the smiley face or the emoticon face) takes the mask full through to the western modern world of technology

Evolving creative portrait painter programs using Darwinian techniques with an automatic fitness function

We experiment with computer creativity by employing and modifying techniques from evolutionary computation to create a related family of abstract portrait painter programs. In evolutionary art, most systems evolve paintings by allowing the artist to selectively breed the artwork \u27by hand\u27 from a selection of the currently evolved population. Our system differs in that it uses an automatic \u27creative fitness function\u27 which allows the evolutionary process to run without stopping for \u27creative human intervention\u27. A recent type of Genetic Programming (GP) is used called Cartesian GP, which has several features that allow our system to favour creative solutions over optimized solutions

3D natural emulation design approach to virtual communities

The design goal for OnLive’s Internet-based Virtual Community system was to develop avatars and virtual communities where the participants sense a tele-presence – that they are really there in the virtual space with other people. This collective sense of "being-there" does not happen over the phone or with teleconferencing; it is a new and emerging phenomenon, unique to 3D virtual communities. While this group presence paradigm is a simple idea, the design and technical issues needed to begin to achieve this on internet-based, consumer PC platforms are complex. This design approach relies heavily on the following immersion-based techniques: · 3D distanced attenuated voice and sound with stereo "hearing" · a 3D navigation scheme that strives to be as comfortable as walking around · an immersive first person user interface with a human vision camera angle · individualized 3D head avatars that breathe, have emotions and lip sync · 3D space design that is geared toward human social interaction

Computationally rendered painterly portrait spaces

This work is ongoing output from research work by Steve DiPaola that attempts to build a computational painting system (called ‘painterly’) that allows aspects of art (the creative human act of fine art painting) and science (cognition, vision and perception; as well as computational design) to both enhance and validate each other. The research takes a novel approach to non photorealistic rendering (NPR) which relies on parameterizing a semantic knowledge space of how a human painter paints, that is, the creative and cognitive process