OC3 Entertainment Announces FaceFX Live™ at Game Developers Conference

Morrisville, NC - March 8, 2006 - OC3 Entertainment, the leading provider of facial animation technology in the video game industry announces that an early version of FaceFX Live will be unleashed at the Game Developers Conference. The product generates facial animation data in real-time using audio input from a microphone and will be shown on an Xbox 360 at OC3 Entertainment’s booth #447.

Games can simulate realistic combat, athletic competition, and countless other real-world activities. But for the first time, FaceFX Live gives developers the tools needed to realistically simulate social interaction. “We enable gamers to communicate in a more realistic way, whether it is an integral part of the game mechanics, or simply a lobby-chat feature.” says John Briggs, Co-Founder of OC3 Entertainment. “The entire spectrum of games -- ranging from online board games to MMORPGs -- will be much more exciting with FaceFX Live.”

OC3 Entertainment will also be showing improvements to its pre-recorded facial animation solution. Version 1.5 of FaceFX is being released at the show featuring support for 7 languages, custom workspaces with 2D sliders, and new ways to share animations and setup across multiple characters. The FaceFX Live product also benefits from the improvements because the exact same content can be used to play pre-recorded and live animations.

The future of facial animation in games will also be unveiled at Expo Suite ES128, where Epic Games will demonstrate FaceFX technology in Unreal Engine 3. “The combined power of FaceFX and Unreal Engine 3 makes it pretty clear that with the proper tools, amazing animations are not only possible, but easily achieved.” states Jamie Redmond, Co-Founder and Technical Director of OC3 Entertainment. “We are very much looking forward to hearing game developers’ reactions after seeing what Epic has done with the integrated FaceFX technology.”

For More Information Contact:

Doug Perkowski
OC3 Entertainment, Inc.
(919) 460-4564
info@oc3ent.com

About FaceFX
FaceFX is an advanced facial animation solution unique in its ability to liberate artists from the complexities of creating realistic dialogue and emotive characters.  The nuances of facial movement can be stored as interactions between morph targets, bone poses, and material properties using the ground-breaking Face Graph™ technology.  FaceFX can be used to animate characters by hand or generate lip-synchronization and speech gesture data automatically from pre-recorded audio.  FaceFX is included with Unreal Engine 3 and available as a standalone product which can be integrated with any facial animation pipeline.

About FaceFX Live
FaceFX Live is an advanced real-time facial animation solution that analyzes audio as it is spoken into a microphone. The solution outputs highly compressed animation data which can then be sent over the network and played in sync with the audio at the other end. The product makes efficient use of processing power, memory, and bandwidth and adds less than one third of a second of latency to the audio transmission. FaceFX Live™ uses industry-leading VoiceIn® speech recognition technology from Fonix to accurately recognize phonemes from the microphone input.

About OC3 Entertainment
OC3 Entertainment (www.oc3ent.com) is a private company dedicated to powering the gaming industry with realistic talking characters. The company develops two middleware solutions for game developers: FaceFX and FaceFX Live.

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