Modeling and Synthesis of Realistic Visual Speech in 3D - 3D Modeling and Animation: Synthesis and Analysis Techniques for the Human Body - page 290

Figure 21. The forecasts expect the European online game market to reach
43% by 2004 when there should be around 73 million online gamers, as
shown on the chart.
The creation of 3D models is often financed through the acquisition of a copyright
over the scanned material, as such copyright enables the holder to spin off such
alternative applications. A segment expected to see a steep growth is online
gaming. Online 3D gaming subscription revenue is expected to grow at an annual
growth rate of 19.7% through 2007, as these sites offer unique experiences and
even episodic updates to gamers (see Figure 21).
Conclusions
Realistic face animation is still a challenge. We have tried to attack this problem
via the acquisition and analysis of 3D face shapes for a selection of visemes.
Such data have been captured for a number of faces, which allows the system
to at least apply a crude adaptation of the visemes to the physiognomy of a novel
face for which no such data could be obtained. The animation is organized as a
navigation through “Viseme Space,” where the influence of different visemes on
the space trajectory varies. Given the necessary input in the form of an ordered
sequence of visemes and their timing, a face animation can be created fully
automatically. Such animation will in practice rather be a point of departure for