Personal avatars emerging with winks and smiles
There is exciting technology being developed in Germany and because of an impromptu meeting at the recent CTIA Wireless Conference in New Orleans, I'm one of the lucky ones to have my own personal 3D Face Avatar. All it took was a photo of my face and some computer wizardry. It was engineered by DOCOMO Communications Laboratories Europe GmbH, or DOCOMO Euro-Labs, which is the Munich, Germany-based research arm of NTT DOCOMO, a Japanese mobile communications operator based in Tokyo. They also have offices in Silicon Valley and Beijing. According to their website, they are one of the world's largest mobile communications operators, with more than more than 59 million customers in Japan. My avatar is in the form of a movie, and when explained by DOCOMO representatives, it demonstrates the ways this technology can “be creative” with the avatar’s face." But ideally, it would be a still image that suddenly comes to life with human-like expressions like smiling, winking, tal...