Phil Bralich of Ergo Linguistic Technologies just posted a URL on www-vrml
that some of you may be interested in: http://www.haptek.com, the creators
of software called Virtual Friend. They're *not* using VRML; they display
a background, and then an animated 3D head model in front of the
background. The head model moves in realistic ways: blinks eyes, scowls,
grimaces, smiles. It can be covered with any of dozens of "skins"
(detailed and realistic texture maps), from aliens to gorillas to clowns to
lions to birds, and can be morphed into any of dozens of shapes at the
click of a button. (The shapes are a wide variety of animal, human, and
alien head shapes, plus dozens of objects -- a chair, a television, steps,
a hand shape, and so on.) The texture-coordinate mapping is *extremely*
good -- most skins look great on most head shapes.
All of this is connected to a speech synthesizer, a text-entry interface, a
natural-language synthesizer, and a system for "making movies"/scripting
performances for the heads.
As usual, it's not quite where we'd want it to be yet. The speech
synthesizer is the standard computery-sounding one on the Mac, and one that
sounds just like it on the PC; non-computer people won't be happy with this
level of speech. There's no parsing of input (though Phil's connection to
the company may mean that's in the works -- Phil, can you comment on
this?); the head just speaks whatever you tell it to, or whatever is in the
pre-recorded file it's playing back, or whatever its NL synthesizer tells
it to. And the interface design isn't great. Also, the 3D is limited --
the only 3D models in the scene are the heads, and though you can rotate or
drag a head in the 3D space, you can't move the camera. And I don't know
if character facial expressions are scriptable.
On the other hand, it does a lot of things right. It looks *great*, and
delivers content at an extremely high frame rate. (version 1.0 runs at
40-50 fps on my PowerBook G3; I forgot to check the frame rate of version
2.x on the PC, but it appears to be similarly high.) It's nicely
self-documenting -- a character appears in the window and teaches you how
to manipulate it. The characters' facial expressions are extremely
expressive, and look very realistic. Something much like this would be a
lovely interface for Erasmatazz. And even if it's not there yet, speech
output and natural language interfaces would definitely be nice for the
kind of interaction we're looking for.
Check it out if you get a chance. The full 40MB PC version is worth
downloading if (a) you have a reasonably fast PC, and (b) you have a fast
enough connection to do the download in reasonable time. Otherwise just
grab the 2-3MB basic PC version and play with it. If you've got a PowerPC
Mac, the 1.0 version isn't as flexible and doesn't provide as many skins or
shapes, but is still quite nice.
--jed
