Talking Head - Visualizations & Level of Detail

Embodied conversational agents are fast growing area of research interest. These agents allow interacting with computers in a natural way. The usage of agents is closely associated with the problem of facial animation. Realistic real-time facial animation is very computational expensive. This work is dedicated to the problem of deformation visualization of pseudo-muscles and head model mesh during the speech using the extended Waters pseudo-muscle head model for animation. These visualizations help us to find out a new way of dynamic level of detail. By reducing activity of particular groups of muscles we can achieve better animation speeds. Running the experiments based on three scenarios proved that these speed-ups are noticeable.