Subjective evaluation of animated talking faces

Computer simulation of human faces has been an active research area for a long time, resulting in a multitude of facial models and several animation systems. Current interest for this technology is clearly shown by its inclusion in the MPEG-4 standard. However, it is less clear what the actual applications of facial animation (FA) will be. We have therefore undertaken experiments on 190 subjects in order to explore the benefits of FA. Part of the experiment was aimed at exploring the objective benefits, i.e., to see if FA can help users to perform certain tasks more accurately or efficiently. The other part of the experiment was aimed at more subjective benefits, like raising the level of appeal to the user, gaining more users interest, filling in the waiting times for server access so the users do not get bored. We present the experiment design and the results, The results show that FA aids users in understanding spoken numbers in noisy conditions (error rates drop from 16% to 8%); that it can make waiting times more acceptable to the user; and that it makes services more attractive to the users