[Bf-committers] 3D character engine

[medeksza at zabaware.com]

Hello,

My name is Robert Medeksza and I am president of Zabaware, Inc. Zabaware
creates artificial intelligence software, specifically chatterbot software
for the consumer market. Our main product, Ultra Hal Assistant, can be
used for entertainment purposes or as a personal assistant. Please see
www.zabaware.com for more information.

Ultra Hal Assistant uses a real-time animated 3D avatar to communicate
with the user along with speech synthesis. Zabaware is looking for an
alternative engine with more power and features than its current one. We
are looking at the possibility of using blender's 3d game engine for this
purpose. We are willing to pay some developers into adding functionality
into blender's game engine in order to meet our requirements.

A brief overview of our requirements:
-Able to render high quality human and non-human characters in real-time
-Able to display a wide variety of emotional facial expressions (happy,
surprised, sad, angry, etc.)
-Characters should be full-body characters
-Character is able to act out certain pre-set animations on command (yawn,
dance, clap, etc)
-Able to lip synch with SAPI speech synthesis engines given real-time
phoneme data from the speech engine
-Character should be in a 3D environment (a room or outdoors), but focus
is on character not environment
-User should be able to control camera to look around character, and zoom
in and out
-A fairly easy and documented way to create compatible characters for this
engine to use
-Must be better or equal to quality of Zabaware's current character engine
(Haptek)

Given these brief requirements, I would ask to ask some questions:
-Is this feasible?
-Is the game engine a GNU GPL library license? We realize that these
improvements to the engine will continue to be open-source and freely
licensed, but we would not like to open our ai engine. Can we use the
engine without it forcing us to open the rest of our software?
-How much work would be involved to meet these requirements in terms of
man hours? Are there interested developers willing to take on this
project? If so, what is your hourly rate?

Thank you,
Robert Medeksza
---------------
President
Zabaware, Inc.
Giving your computer the power of thought!
www.zabaware.com
RM at Zabaware.com
814-440-8676