Oki adds live character animation to cell phones

[Colin Dunstan]

Japan's Oki has developed an image recognition technology which tracks the movements of an human's face - including specific features such as eyes, eyebrows, mouth - captures it with a cell phone's camera, and generates a character animation from it by synchronizing the movement with an anime-like 3D character. The technology, called FaceCommunicator Embedded Edition, allows users to hide their true identity when they interact with other people through communications over mobile phones and Internet chats. From Oki's website:

FaceCommunicator consists of two software modules, Expression Generator and Animation Generator. Expression Generator calculates how the parts of the face (eyes, eyebrows, lips, etc.) should be changed, and sends as parameters to Animation Generator. Animation Generator generates animation by moving / changing the parts of the face based on the parameters and hence displays the changes in expression.

[via DeviceForge]