The role of emotion in believable agents
Communications of the ACM
Computer facial animation
The persona effect: affective impact of animated pedagogical agents
Proceedings of the ACM SIGCHI Conference on Human factors in computing systems
3-D human modeling and animation
3-D human modeling and animation
Explanatory lifelike avatars: performing user-centered tasks in 3D learning environments
Proceedings of the third annual conference on Autonomous Agents
MPEG-4: A Multimedia Standard for the Third Millennium, Part 1
IEEE MultiMedia
The Persona Effect: How Substantial Is It?
HCI '98 Proceedings of HCI on People and Computers XIII
An adaptive personality model for ECAs
ACII'05 Proceedings of the First international conference on Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction
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The MetaFace system is being developed to provide a well-defined metaphor and metaphor-enabling framework for websites. This will be achieved through the use of a talking head, complete with facial animation, speech synthesis and artificial intelligence (an anthropomorphic metaphor). Of paramount importance to talking head technology, such as MetaFace, is the concept of believability. By creating a believable character, users are likely to spend more time using software because of motivational properties. Motivation can affect how long a user interacts with a website and thus is a very important aspect of e-commerce (and not just for online purchases). The MPEG-4 standard is a key technology of MetaFace and similar systems because it includes specifications for facial animation and is highly efficient when communicating this data over the Internet. This paper discusses the technical aspects of MEPG-4 facial animation, how MPEG-4 can affect believability, and how to overcome any inhibitive aspects.