Hey this tech is cool what happened to Altiverse? You guys do anything else interesting?
  Altiverse Systems didn't survive the April crash. We were not public, by any stretch of the imagination. However when the bottom dropped out of the market, our chance's of getting the funding we needed vanished. 

  We spent a great deal of time working on a biz plan and product specification. Trying to create a serious treatment of concept of the Metaverse. We are looking at publishing some of the spec if only to contribute to the general "how do you make a persistent world" discussion.

Why did you write Expression?
It seemed that there were a lot of pieces floating around the industry phonetic analyzer, streaming audio,  but no real time facial animation.

I was really trying to build this:

Hey.. ambition is good.

Both lipsinc  and mediasyncsolutions sell real-time phonetic analysis software, face 2 face  is one of a few companies that have software for capturing face expressions, not in real time but give it a few years. 

Why open source?
   Well trying to start up a company was a bit of an experiment, learned a lot from it, suggest it to everyone. I could have left Expression closed source. However, I'm not sure it would ever become more then a portfolio piece, and more then anything I really want it used. So here is another experiment, I'm giving away an almost finished product, will people use it? Contribute?

  I am attached to the Metaverse concept, not because its a kick ass game, but because of the thing that so often has been missed. To me the Metaverse is all about Juniata's work on human interaction, I think that it would enable a richer level of interaction online. Expression was the heart of that.

   On a random personal note, I'm turning 24 next week, I'm old... past my prime... All down hill from here :-). I think a good percentage of my college cohorts have their masters already. Here's my thesis, can I have a masters?

Why the QPL?
It seemed like a good balance between the GPL which is a commercial poison pill of a Public domain license. I still have rights to the work, and still sell the system. 

How much time was spent on Expression?
6-9 months over the course of 18 months

Who's head is that?
It's a liberal rendition of my own. I'm hoping to add additional models in time. 

What should I do with Expression?

• Build your own Metaverse. 
• Add it to your game and improve how people interact with each other.
• Build a cool agent system
• Contribute
• Make a version of Eliza that talks, (If someone actually does this I will happily make them a Freud head) 
• Build ananova.com  in real-time
• Build a speech therapy system

Does Expression work as a morph target system?
Yes, it does the only thing missing is a function curve exporter from 3dsmax.

Why should I use a muscles system over morph target system in that case?
Morph targets need to be redone if you change the number of verts in a mesh the however the muscles still work fine. If you have a set of similar, but not identical models, setting up the muscles should also be much faster.

Does Expression work with a skeletal system?
Yes it does, I have demo code that I'll be posting some time in the future showing it integrated with a open  source skeletal animation system - dejaview - the main thing is that you need to have an additional vertex cache. Expression's input is the base mesh, its output is a morphed face and body in rest pose. That cache is then used as the basis for the skeletal system.