project for research - help in the study of autism

[jeffm]

Hi.
I'm a research psychologist at the University of Washington in Seattle who studies children with autism (a severe developmental disability associated with difficulties in social relationships and communication).  I've begun developing a program in which a character's eyes are animated such that they can track another mesh on the screen.  I eventually want to use this program as a means for stimulus presentation for the behavioral testing we do in our studies.  I use Lightwave 7.5 for my modeling and then save them out as 3DS files for use with TrueVision.  I'd like the program in VB.NET.  All my code does now is to have 2 eyes that can follow another object that is moved via keyboard commands.  The eyes and the object just float in space and haven't been integrated into a head or other aspects of an environment.

Does anyone have an animated face with moving eyes that can be easily oriented toward other objects in the scene that they could contribute to this project?  I don't have that much time for programming these days and I'd like to make progress if I can find people interested in helping.  If you are interested in this project please let me know via email.  I'll try to check this board but email will be easiest.

Thank you.
Jeff Munson, PhD
Autism Center
University of Washington

[newborn]

For a side project, it's interesting... yes, I would like to contact yo via email but... what is it?

[darqSHADOW]

Excellent project, I definately look forward to seeing more of this.  (Newborn, you can click the 'email' link under his post to send an email, this keeps the email private, if he wishes, and makes it so spiders won't find it.)

I will email you as well, as I'd like to offer the support of the Truevision3D team to you, as well.  Autism is definately a worthy cause.

DS

[jeffm]

Thanks for your interest.  My email is jeff.mun@verizon.net

I'm very happy to talk about this project.

- Jeff

[Slider]

This is nice. I worked on a learning tool for children with Autism as well. It was for a school project. We wanted to learn children how to recognize certain human expressions. We bundled this in a simple puzzle game. I made an facial expression system for this but we eventually decided to use video material instead.

[GoodVillain]

Wow, this is a great use for TV3d.