FaceSpace: A facial spatial domain toolkit

We will describe a visual development system for
exploring face space, both in terms of facial types and
animated expressions. Imagine an n-dimensional space
describing every humanoid face, where each dimension
represents a different facial characteristic. Within this
continuous space, it would be possible to traverse a path
from any face to any other face, morphing through faces
along that path. It is also possible to combine elements of
this space to create an expressive, emotive, talking 3D
synthetic face of any given facial type.
This development toolkit called FaceSpace is based
on a hierarchical parametric approach to facial animation
and creation. We present our early results on exploring a
face space and describe our preliminary investigation of
the perceptual and cultural relationships between different
facial types; as well as creating an additive language of
hierarchical expressions, emotions and lip-sync sequences
by using combined elements of a facial domain.