Do those smileys that some people stick at the end of their e-mails make you grumpy? Maybe looking at the sender’s actual face would make you feel better.
That’s the idea behind a program that Xin Li developed as a doctoral student at the University of Pittsburgh in 2004 and 2005. The FaceAlive Icons are designed to enable individuals to better express their emotions in e-mail, cellular text messages and other online communications, according to Li, now a Google employee.
The technology behind FaceAlive Icons is detailed in an article in the Journal of Visual Languages and Computing . The concept behind the program came from Shi-Kuo Change, a professor at Pitt, who was looking to personalize a distance learning sysem.
“FaceAlive is a new approach that could change how people express their feelings online,” said Li, in a statement.
Chang says FaceAlive is an improvement over seemingly more sophisticated technologies such as Web cameras, which can be awkward to use and slugglish on certain Internet connections.
The FaceAlive program works with one expressionless photo of an individual and then reworks it into happy, sad, angry, surprised, disgusted and fearful versions. Li tested the program and found that message recipients could correctly identify the emotions of the sender about 80% of the time.
