Self-review is essential to improving presentation, particularly for novice/unskilled researchers. In general, they could record a video of their presentation, and then check it out for self-review. However, they would be quite uncomfortable due to their appearance and voice in the video. They also struggle with in-depth self-review. To address these issues, we designed a presentation avatar that reproduces presentation made by researchers. The presentation avatar intends to increase self-awareness through self-reviewing. We also designed a checklist to aid in a detailed self-review, which includes points to be reviewed. This paper also demonstrates presentation avatar systems that use a virtual character and a robot, to allow novice/unskilled researchers as learners to self-review their own presentation using the checklist. The results of case studies with the systems indicate that the presentation avatar systems have the potential to promote self-review. In particular, we found that robot avatar promoted engagement in self-reviewing presentation.

We propose a method for embedding the awareness state and response state in an image-based avatar to smoothly and automatically start an interaction with a user. When both states are not embedded, the image-based avatar can become non-responsive or slow to respond. To consider the beginning of an interaction, we observed the behaviors between a user and receptionist in an information center. Our method replayed the behaviors of the receptionist at appropriate times in each state of the image-based avatar. Experimental results demonstrate that, at the beginning of the interaction, our method for embedding the awareness state and response state increased subjective scores more than not embedding the states.

A framework for generating facial expressions from emotional states in daily conversation is described. It provides a mapping between emotional states and facial expressions, where the former is represented by vectors with psychologically-defined abstract dimensions, and the latter is coded by the Facial Action Coding System. In order to obtain the mapping, parallel data with rated emotional states and facial expressions were collected for utterances of a female speaker, and a neural network was trained with the data. The effectiveness of proposed method is verified by a subjective evaluation test. As the result, the Mean Opinion Score with respect to the suitability of generated facial expression was 3.86 for the speaker, which was close to that of hand-made facial expressions.

We have developed a visualization system for dialog text exchanged in e-learning virtual classrooms. In this system, text-based online discussions among learners are effectively visualized as discussions held in a virtual classroom in cyberspace. Discussion participants are displayed as avatars. The virtual classroom maintains the interest of learners because it incorporates professional camerawork and switching know-how based on rules derived from an analysis of 42 TV programs. The gestures of the CG avatar depend on the dialog text. A series of virtual classroom experiments confirmed that elementary and junior high school students maintained an interest in using the system.

The sign-language can be used as a communication means between avatars having no common language. As a trial to overcome the linguistic barrier, we have previously developed a 2D model-based sign-language chatting system between Korean and Japanese on the the Internet. In that system, there have been some problems to be solved for natural animation and real-time transmission. In this paper, we employ a 3D character model for stereoscopic gestures in the sign-language animation. We also utilize CG animation techniques which use the variable number of frames and a cubic spline interpolation in order to generate realistic gestures. For real-time communication, on the other hand, we make use of an intelligent communication method on a client-server architecture. We implement a preliminary communication system with Visual C++ 5.0 and Open Inventor on Windows platforms. Experimental results show a possibility that the system could be used for avatar communications between different languages.

In order to investigate the possibility of avatar communication using sign-language, in this paper, we develop a sign-language chatting system on the Internet using CG aniamtion techniques between Korea and Japan. We construct the system in server-client architecture, where images of Korean or Japanese sign-language are analyzed into a series of parameters for sign-language animation by server. We transmit the parameters, which are text data instead of images or their compression, to clients and regenerate the corresponding CG animation using the received data. The chatting system is implemented with Visual C++ 5.0 on Windows platforms. Experimental results show that the sign-language could be used as a communication means between avatars of different languages.