Overview

Watson is a real-time visual feedback recognition library for interactive interfaces that can recognize recognizes head gaze, head gestures, eye gaze and eye gestures using the images of a monocular or stereo camera. It can be easily installed on a Microsoft Windows system using the installation package. After installation follow the instructions below to configure Watson for your camera. Please see these sites for details of this component:

• WATSON: Real-time Head Tracking and Gesture Recognition
• Watson Head Tracker

Users

Launching

You can start Watson from the toolkit Launcher (work in progress). as part of the Rapport 1.0 system.  By default, Watson for the toolkit Toolkit is configured to work with a USB camera using the VFW (Video for Windows) driver.  If using a different camera or dirver driver, change the camera type parameter accordingly.  See the developer section below for details.

Developers

Configuring

Configuration

Watson comes configured to work properly with a USB webcam.  If you wish to change any of the parameters below, make modifications to this file: In order to use Watson with the rest of the Virtual Human toolkit, a few parameters need to be set in the ParamWatsonUser.cfg found in WATSON_DIRbin\Watson\Sequences\saso\ where WATSON_DIR is the directory where Watson is installedUSB.

Changing the camera type

By default, Watson for the toolkit Toolkit is configured to work with a USB camera using the VFW (Video for Windows) driver.  If using a different camera or dirver driver, change the camera type parameter accordingly.

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CAMERA_TYPE is USB_DIRECTX for DirectX driver or DRAGONFLY for Point Grey DragonFly camera.  If using Stereo Camera, please see the section on below 'Configuration for Stereo Camera'.

Configuration for Stereo Camera

In order to To use Watson with the toolkit using Stero camera, use the 'Watson-Stereo Camera' shortcut created during installation. The 'Start In' or' Wroking Directory' for stereo camera is set to be WATSON_DIRToolkit using a Stereo Camera, look in bin\Watson\Sequences\SRI.  However, the configuration file 'ParamWatsonUser.cfg' in this directory is not configured to work with the rest of the toolkit Toolkit by default. The   Add the section to set up Active MQ ActiveMQ messaging needs to be added to the ParamWatsonUser.cfg so Watson can .  This will enable Watson to send messages and work with the rest of the toolkitToolkit.  See the 'Setting up ActiveMQ messaging' sections section below for activating ActiveMQ messaging for the Stereo Camera set up.

Setting up ActiveMQ messaging

Note: If using the WATSON_DIRcore\Watson\Sequences\saso\ USB configuration for VH toolkit, this section should already be set up in the configuration file.  If using other Watson configuration (such as WATSON_DIR core\Watson\Sequences\SRI for stereo cameraStereo Camera, add this section to the ParamWatsonUser.cfg file

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This activates ActiveMQ messaging and will start sending messages related to head nod nods and facing.  The facing message tells which object (or character) you are facing.

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The commands related to facing are deifined defined so that a region in 3D space is created and associated to a caption.  To create the region of interest (ROI), imagine a plane parallel to the image plane of the camera.
Eg: .  e.g., In case of a webcam in a laptop, the computer screen is already parallel with the camera.  The camera is the referential(0,0,0).  When looking at the camera, the X axis goes (positive) to the right.  The Y axis goes (positive) up.

Regions of Interest on the screen can be associated by adding the appropriate caption and coordinates as shown in the example below.  The example assumes that we are creating two Regions of Interest with captions "doctor" and "elder" and shows how to associate coordinates to these captions in order to created create ROIs.

A "doctor" region can be associated to the right part of the screen by adding these two commands at the end of ParamWatsonUser.cfg (after the section statement):

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• vrVision

Receives

Known Issues

Watson needs certain configuration files during start up. Hence the 'Working Directory' or 'Start in' directory needs to be set to the correct one before launching Watson. For the VH toolkit this directory is the WATSON_DIR\Sequences\saso\ directory where WATSON_DIR is the directory where Watson is installed.

• In order to use Watson with the toolkit, right click on any of the shortcuts based on your camera type created during installation on the desktop and open "Properties".

• Change the "Start In" folder to use WATSON_DIR\Sequences\saso\ and click OK. By default, Watson for VH is configured to work with USB camera using VFW (Video for Windows) driver. If using a different camera or dirver , see the 'Changing the camera type' section to change the camera or driver type.

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FAQ

FAQ