Wed Jan 7 14:58:00 WST 2009

 

 

OZCHI 2001 Workshop
Talking Head Technology

Tuesday 20 November 2001,

Esplanade Hotel, Fremantle, Western Australia

http://www.we-bcentre.com/ozchi2001/

Recently, the increase in desktop computing functionality and power has signalled a dramatic change in the design of user interfaces. Multi and hyper media technology allows for interfaces that incorporate computer generated speech along with realistically rendered computer animated human heads. This, coupled with intelligent language parsing and tailor-made knowledge bases, enable a Web-based Talking Head Interface to information and applications. To be useful, however, these interfaces have to behave in a believable and natural manner. The disciplines of computer graphics, artificial intelligence, text to speech synthesis, network communications, psychology, user interface design and software agents provide the foundations for Talking Head Technology. The purpose of this workshop is to discuss current and future Talking Head Technology.

Topics of interest for Talking Head Technology:

  • conversational skills of Talking Heads - natural language parsing and knowledge bases
  • Talking Head directing - controlling of emotions, speech intonation, facial behaviour
  • Talking Head modeling / rendering (e.g. MPEG-4, AU, skin models)
  • Factors which influence user acceptance, i.e. the use of cartoon-like characters vs. photorealism
  • applications - shop assistants, presentation agents for the WWW, pedagogical agents etc.
  • Talking Heads for Virtual Worlds and VR
  • Talking Head-user interaction paradigms
  • Talking Heads on the Web
  • Personality models for Talking Heads
  • Text to Speech systems for Talking Heads
    •

    Workshop Format: The workshop took place just before the OZCHI 2001 Conference, at the same location. As such, it provided an important opportunity for researchers who attended the conference to spend more time exploring topics of common interest. The half day Workshop consisted of three parts - Talking Head Demonstrations, Paper session and Panel Discussion.

    Workshop
    Organizers    :

    		Andrew Marriott Curtin University of Technology  raytrace@talkingheads.computing.edu.au
    Simon BeardCurtin University of Technology beardsw@cs.curtin.edu.au;
    Roberto PockajUniversity of Genoa, Italy pok@dist.unige.it

    Further Information: Please contact
           Andrew Marriot, raytrace@talkingheads.computing.edu.au.

    We hope you enjoy the various papers / discussion and find them informative. Please send any comments to the email address specified below or feel free to annotate the individual articles.

    Talking
    Heads
    Technology
    Workshop
    Proceedings
    Talking Heads Technology Workshop raytrace@talkingheads.computing.edu.au