A new trend continues to populate the planet, particularly through cyberspace: virtual humanoids, which are also found under such names as avatars, conversational agents, and talking heads. H-Anim and the MPEG-4 ISO standard arise as the main answers to the need for a standard representation of a virtual humanoid, both the body and the face.

This short paper summarizes an open-source toolkit called Xface for the creation and animation of faces. The authors propose an Extensible Markup Language (XML) based language to configure the different parts of a face model: one or several three-dimensional (3D) models, textures, MPEG-4 facial definition parameters (FDPs), zone of influences for each FDP, and muscle models for the different zones of the face. Also, they use an XML-based scripting language, SMIL-agent, to express a particular conversation that combines speech with facial expression and gestures.

The toolkit includes Xface and SMIL editors, and a player that animates the face with synchronization of voice, lip movements, facial expressions, gestures, and head and eye movements.

This work is particularly interesting to developers, as the toolkit includes a core library to embed 3D faces in their applications. It should be emphasized that works like this are particularly valuable because the open-source nature allows for research development.