Veepers 3.0: talking Web characters from Pulse.(Brief Article)

Ever since the Internet took off in the mid-'90s, companies have been looking for ways to create a more personal Web experience. To this end, Pulse has introduced Veepers--talking characters requiring very low bandwidth that can be added to a Web page.

Veepers is about as easy to use as software gets. The only thing you need to begin with is a photograph of a person taken head on. (At press time, Pulse had added the ability to create full-body Veepers.) This person needs to have a neutral expression on his or her face. You import this image to Veepers, where the process begins.

The process of setting up a Veepers character is divided into several simple steps. First, as mentioned, you load the photo. Next, you need to define where the head is in the photograph, a task accomplished by painting out everything in the background except the head. Veepers provides a number of paintbrush and lasso tools for you to use, but if the background has sufficient contrast, the software can automatically extract the head.

After the background is masked out, you'll go through a series of steps to tell Veepers where the major areas of the face are located. The package does its best to find features like the pupils, eyebrows, mouth, nose, and outline of the face, and you can then tweak what Veepers finds for an exact match.

After these steps are completed, finalizing the Veepers character is a matter of selecting a file size and saving the file. Once the file is saved, a Web page pops up where you can view the character as it would appear in your project. The Web page has controls for viewing the different expressions of the character as well as seeing how it lip syncs to dialog.

To accomplish this, Veepers uses basic animation principles as well as a bit of high technology sleight of hand. The pixels of the face are seamlessly warped to create facial poses. These are then driven by Veepers to give the illusion of facial motion. As the character talks, for example, the eyes blink and the head rocks back and forth to give it life.

While this is certainly impressive technology, t was not terribly impressed with the results. The human eye is sensitive to how a real face moves and behaves, and Veepers faces do not move realistically enough to fool the eye.