How do people react if they are to face a long dead writer for "real"? This interesting question is pursued by a team led by professor Hamido Fujita from the Iwate Prefectural University in Japan. For this experiment, the scientists chose Kenji Miyzawa, a writer broadly known in Japan, who was born in 1896 in Iwate. This man was brought back to virtual life with enormous technical efforts.
Now while Kenji Miyzawa war reciting his own works of fiction, the behavior of some test persons watching this presentation was monitored with video cameras. The analysis of the collected data was done with INTERACT afterwards. The scientists where not only interested in the common behavior of the test person, but also did some FACS (Facial Action Coding System) analysis. For this, INTERACT was the team's program of choice, too.
As the team of scientists where also highly interested in analyzing audio data, another solution from the Mangold portfolio was used. Using the Soundalyzer in their studies, which is highly integrated in the INTERACT environment, a great time saving could be achieved.
The team at Mangold International is very proud of having contributed in making the work during this study easier for the scientists. On this subject, professor Hamido Fujita said: "This research has been accelerated and moved further on after we have used INTERACT especially for creating Kenji style based on psychological observation of user".
Now how does this virtual Kenji Miyzawa look like?
The following video gives a short impression...
Video...
Further information about the work at the Iwate Prefectural University can be found in the following documents:
- Virtual cognitive model for Miyazawa Kenji based on speech and facial images regognition
- A Recognition based Style for Miyzawa-Kenji Virtual model
- Facial Expression Recognition and Synthesis for Virtual miyazawa Kenji System
- A Framework of a Speech Communication System with Emotion Processing
