Improving communication skills of children with ASDs through interaction with virtual characters

This article presents the LIFEisGAME project, a serious game that will help children with ASDs to recognize and express emotions through facial expressions. The game design tackles the main experiential learning cycle of emotion recognition: watch and recognize, learn by doing, recognize and mimic, generalize or knowledge transfer to real life. We briefly describe the technology behind the character animation pipeline centered on the creation of a generic rig. Then, we detail the facial expression analyzer that uses Active Appearance Models. Last, we describe the user study experiment using game mode “recognize the expression”.