Pros: Synchronizes animation to Macintalk or digitized speech; thorough manual; excellent import/export capabilities; full color support.
Cons: Requires some programming; feeble drawing environment; limited usefulness.
Company: Bright Star Technology. List price: $499.95.
Requires: Mac Plus; 2MB RAM; hard disk.
Nobody asks "What's InterFACE?" without getting told about Disney's "The Absent-Minded Professor" TV series, which features a Macintosh with a cartoony image of Albert Einstein on its screen. This animated Albert talks, interacting with the show's live actors, in the slurred accent we know as Macintalk. When Albert's facial muscles aren't carefully forming the syllables he's speaking, he blinks, smiles, and registers surprise.
Albert is a product of InterFACE, a unique Facial Animation Construction Environment for generating such talking heads, known in the computer-interface world as agents. This is random-access animation; in other words, you don't have to create a complete sequential movie that lasts as long as your actor talks. You need to draw 8, 16, or 32 images, each showing your character's mouth in a different speaking position. Once you've equipped the program with this set of basic images, InterFACE creates the animation automatically, displaying the proper images at the proper instants, so that the face syncs up with the words you've given it to say.
MACINTALKING
There are two ways to tell InterFACE what you want your agent to say. If you use Macintalk, all you have to do is type up the script. InterFACE is smart enough to analyze what you've typed and animate your actor accordingly (see "Speaking Up"). Even if you follow the manual's instructions for tweaking your text's spelling to make the Macintalk speech more intelligible, however, your on-screen alter ego still sounds like a computer.
Your alternative is to use digitized sound, recording what you want your agent to say using the MacRecorder (a plug-in microphone and sound digitizer from Farallon that retails for $249). Your agent now not only sounds more human -- it also sounds like you, with the exact timing, inflection, and emphasis you want. And InterFACE has a MacRecorder interface built right in (such hooks to outside programs and products are one of InterFACE's best characteristics).
THE SOUNDING BOARD
The drawback to using digitized sounds is that the computer has no way of knowing what consonants and vowels were used to form the words in your recording. InterFACE can't tell where one word ends and another begins, and therefore it doesn't know how to animate the agent to match the speech.
To synchronize the facial animation with the words you've recorded, you go to Speech Sync mode. You type a transcription of the recorded speech, and InterFACE encodes what you type into a series of RAVE (InterFACE programming language) commands that control the animated face on the screen (see "Getting RAVEs").
For example, if you type Yikes! into the text window, the program writes "Y 4 AY 9 K 3 Z 12" in the RAVE-command window. The letters represent spoken sounds, and the numbers are timing values in 1/60 second increments. Now, listening to one fragment of the digitized speech at a time, it's your job to edit the timing values of the RAVE commands -- make the Y last a little longer, the K a little shorter -- until the lip movements of your actor are synchronized with the digitized voice.
To hear a syllable you must precisely highlight its letter and number combination, or the program won't play any sound at all. To edit a timing value -- which you must do for nearly every vowel and consonant in the recording -- you must carefully retype the number. Because the RAVE commands you're editing appear in the 9-point Monaco font, all of this text-highlighting is tedious and difficult. There is, to be sure, a sort of cloak-and-dagger thrill in making an imaginary electronic person speak real English; and, with practice, it becomes less of a trial-and-error process.
Nonetheless, the synchronization process requires patience and artistry.
THE DRAWING BOARD
Creating the individual facial images is fraught with pitfalls of a similar nature. You can draw the images freehand in any Macintosh graphics program, or -- for greater realism -- you can digitize a real person's image. As you mig guess, it takes some effort to create digitized images; the easiest method might be to use a digitizer like Digital Visions' ComputerEyes ($395) and an ordinary camcorder or VCR.Some video systems include a frame-grabbing feature so that your subject needs to hold each facial position for only a second or two; others require the subject to hold each position, stock still, for as long as 30 seconds, until the digitizing is done.
In any case, you'll certainly want to avoid creating your images within InterFACE. Even though the program offers a color, pseudo-MacPaint environment, it's been hastily assembled and has some spectacularly feeble aspects (no Undo and a useless FatBits mode, for example). Once again, InterFACE's powerful import and export features prove to be its most valuable.
The result of all this work -- creating the actor and synchronizing speech -- is animated, talking image on your screen. The effect isn't completely convincing; even the most carefully created agents vaguely remind you of the jerky, computer-generated Max Headroom. But they're visually arresting: you can't take your eyes off them.
AGENTS AND ACTORS
With the exceptions of its dreadful pseudo-MacPaint mode and the tedium of synchronizing digitized sounds, InterFACE is polished and well executed. The manual, for example, goes far beyond explaining menu commands; it includes intelligent, thoughtful chapters on, for example, Using Foreign Languages, Digitizing a Live Subject, and Choosing the Right Vowel (for Macintalk).
Bright Star Technology has even provided examples, ideas, and software hooks to make the agent technology useful. You get over 10 megabytes of sample applications, actors, and clip art. Instructions are provided for installing your agents into Wingz, MicroPhone, MacroMind Director II, FoxBase+/Mac, HyperCard, or any Pascal or C program. There's also a list of possible uses for this technology, such as online help systems, business presentations, and education. A chapter in the manual even claims that the computer interface of the future will sport smiling, articulate agents on the screen.
In the meantime, you may have to use your imagination to find a use for this unique, clever, carefully assembled toolkit -- unless, of course, you work for Disney.
