August 06, 2006
Digital Artwork That Changes To Suit Your Mood
Computer scientists from the University of Bath in the UK in conjunction with Boston University have developed electronic artwork that changes to match the mood of the person who is looking at it.
It processes images collected through a web cam using special software that recognizes eight key facial features that characterise the emotional state of the person viewing the artwork. It then adapts the colors and brush strokes of the digital artwork to suit the changing mood of the viewer.
If the viewer is angry the colors are dark and appear to have been applied to the canvas with more aggressive brush strokes. If the viewer's expression changes to happy, the artwork adapts so that the colors are vibrant and more subtly applied.
The project forms part of on-going research looking to develop a range of advanced artwork tools for use in the computer graphics industry. This has already resulted in software which produces highly-detailed artistic versions of photographs, and allows designers to create animations directly from digital footage. The program analyzes the image for eight facial expressions, such as the position and shape of the mouth, the openness of the eyes, and the angle of the brows, to work out the emotional state of the viewer, This is done in 'real time' so when the viewer's emotions change the artwork responds accordingly.
According to the researchers, "this results in a digital canvas that smoothly varies its colors and style, and provides a novel interactive artistic experience. This kind of empathic painting only needs a desk top computer and a webcam to work, so once you have the program and have calibrated it for the individual viewer, you are ready to start creating personalised art based on your mood."
This type of digital painting is an experiment into the feasibility of using high level control parameters, such as emotional state, to replace the many low-level tools that users currently have at their disposal to affect the output of artistic rendering. The images used in the project were created by the researchers using advanced artistic rendering techniques which give the computer-generated artwork the appearance of having been painted onto canvas.
The research was recently presented at the fourth International Symposium on Non-Photorealistic Animation and Rendering conference in Annecy as part of the International Animation Festival. http://www.npar.org/2006/
Empathic Painting page at the University of Bath
Computer Science Department Boston University
Posted by rsk at August 6, 2006 10:51 PM