The 3rd International Symposium on Facial Analysis and Animation (FAA) was held on September 21 at the Museum of Young Arts in Vienna. According to the organizing committee the FAA is the only international conference that solely focusses on the analysis of animation of faces. The field of participants ranged from social scientists who analyzed the perception of different animation techniques to companies that presented their newest tracking algorithms. Therefore the talks as well as the poster presentations gave a good overview of this very interesting field of research with multiple relations both to professional applications (e.g. entertainment industry) and interdisciplinary research.
One of the currently investigated research topics is performance driven animation, i.e. facial animation controlled by facial movements of human actors. Despite the fact that the state of development of the presented animations seems intriguingly spohisticated the research community aims at even more robust methods for both tracking and animating for professional applications. Another interesting topic are facial analysis and animation tools with live support that do not require professional 3D-tracking hardware but rely on consumer hardware like simple webcams (Image Metrics Live Driver) or the Microsoft Kinect (Face Shift) instead.
At the conference CrossWorlds made some interesting contacts to both professionals and researchers resulting in research collaborations with Image Metrics and intense information exchange with researchers from different backgrounds.