Coming soon, personalized 'emoticons', using your own smiley face.
The researchers behind the system say it can quickly transform a user's face to convey any of six emotions, ranging from anger to happiness.
A user first uploads a picture of their face with a "neutral" expression. Then they use their mouse to mark the ends of their eyebrows, the corners of their mouth and the edges of their eyes and lips.
The software uses these points to morph the face to express different emotions: happiness, sadness, fear, anger, surprise, and disgust. A user can select an emotion and one of three intensity levels when using the system.
"We think it could be an improvement on the crude emoticons [ :-) ] instant messaging programmes use now," says Anthony Boucouvalas who created the system with colleagues at Bournemouth University in the UK. "It isn't perfect but it gets the message across and is very convenient."
--
In future, the researchers may integrate the face morphing software with a program that uses a dictionary of 18,000 words and basic grammatical phrases to identify the emotional content of a message.