Simple emphatic user interface for virtual heritage

Abstract

We present a simple user interface combining h-Anim with Perlin’s face. The main application is for exploring virtual environments especially those representing real environments with places, buildings or objects that belong to cultural heritage or those with historical past, famous story or something interesting. Therefore, information about them should be delivered to user. This kind of information is usually full of emotions and that is why the most suitable way (from user interface point of view) is to deliver it with emphatic storytelling. We are introducing our simple emphatic system (implementation uses ActiveX objects, VRML, ECMA Script, Java Script) that uses simple hardware configuration with web cams used for capturing user’s presence and his/her head movements and if possible capturing position of some facial features, defined in MPEG-4 standard, and used to recognize user’s simple emotions. User presence, head movements , and simple emotions are used to create simple emphatic user interface. In this paper we present our results already used in some application projects for virtual museums.