Facial Animation and motion capture: key role for the communication

Abstract

In the last 100 years we have observed a great development of the technology. This development applied to the mass media as the radio, the cinema, the television, or Internet have influence in the human communication and the interaction of the society with the technologies. The new communicative environments need new actors (avatars) with high communicate face expression. The modeling and the animation of an expressive human face are the greatest challenges in computer graphics because we are able to detect the nuances of even the most basic movement of the face. The cinema and the video games are the fields that more have worked the creation of virtual, “real” and believable characters. With this work, we have analyzed the concrete case of the 3D animation cinema, studying how the technologies of character’s creation (with or without motion capture technique) can generate a major empathy with the user. Nowadays, the animation technique called motion capture is usually present in the production of animation cinema. Our main objectives are to evaluate if these skills can improve the facial animation and if this progress generates amplified emotional response on users.