Talking Heads
If you noticed a family resemblance between the responsive
monsters in the Halloween 
Card Creator
featured in PingRay's Issue 2, and the VHost animated talking heads that greet you on practically every third Web site…you are correct.
The parents of both offspring are a 5-year-old New
York-based company named … appropriately enough for the wranglers of this cast
of unusual characters … Oddcast.
According to Chief Technical Officer Gil Sideman, the
ancestor of most of these characters was a George Bush "dress-'em-up" Flash-based character that Oddcast did before the
2000 election—initially as a technical challenge to simulate a 3D face in
Flash, according to Sideman.
It caught on immediately, was emailed by zillions of people
around the globe, and evolved into a line of “character products” that Oddcast has
created…including a "Cheerioke" singalong for Cheerios), a Discovery channel trivia quiz with Albert Einstein, a virtual Elvis and many others. Today, says Sideman, more than 4000
customers use the VHost development environment.
The VHost characters have several remarkable aspects. The
heads look quite lifelike, as if they resemble someone you know, and the way
the eyes follow your cursor—a common-enough trick for Flash animated eyes, but
startling nonetheless—adds to the feeling of awareness.
But the biggest trick may well be the reasonably realistic lip-synching,
whether the voices have been pre-recorded or, as in the case of the Card
Creator, when the text is typed in by the user and spoken on the fly by the
characters. All of the voices are synthetic, Sideman says, created by
text-to-speech generation. Oddcast uses software that analyzes the audio
waveform and the text on the fly, to signal the appropriate lip movements.
In the near future, Oddcast will be offering more facial
expression control for the VHost characters…so you will be able to input not
only words for the characters to express, but emotions as well. Already, the
company is in partnership with ICQ for users to create virtual avatars that
can, among other things, express emoticons. And Sideman is particularly excited about Flash—and high-speed data
access—on mobile devices.
Perhaps sometime soon, then, expect to see Oddcast VHost-ers
showing up on your cell phone: George Bush trying to pitch Republicans to you,
for instance. Or, maybe some day, lazy trick-or-treaters can send their Halloween
avatar selves, delivering personalized, in-character Halloween greetings and
showing appropriate expressions, to each cell phone in the neighborhood…and
letting them know that someone will soon drop by to pick up the candy.
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