The ability of socially and emotionally impaired individuals to recognize and respond to emotions conveyed by the face is critical to improve their communication skills.

The LIFEisGAME project attempts to show how it is possible to apply a pioneer serious game approach to teach people with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) to recognize facial emotions, using real time synthesis and automatic facial expression analysis. This is a joint project between Portugal and UT Austin.

The LIFEisGAME project is part of a broader research effort, focusing on an open question of scientific and clinical importance, of whether the use of virtual characters in interactive training programs can provide a basis for ASD rehabilitation. But first, we need to develop the technology. LIFEisGAME overall objective is to deploy a low cost real time facial animation system embedded in an experimental game, which will allow to further study the symptomatic problems of facial emotion recognition.

LIFEisGAME advances the synthesis of realistic virtual characters and markerless motion capture technology, and creates a non-stressful game to help individuals recognize facial emotions in an interactive way.

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