Grimace is a free Flash-based web component which displays emotions through facial expressions of a comic-like face. It is based on the idea that the face can serve as an accurate representative of emotional information, which is difficult to express verbally.
The face is simple yet highly expressive and can represent subtle emotional changes through arbitrary blending of 6 basic emotions. The design is derived from the book Making Comics by Scott McCloud. Possible applications include experimental research settings and the augmentation of textual descriptions on websites with emotional information.
Developed in pure Actionscript 3 and delivered as a lightweight SWF file, Grimace can be conveniently integrated into your own project using Javascript, Flex, Flash IDE or pure Actionscript. Configuration entirely takes place through external XML-based files, which allow full customization.
Try moving your mouse over the face on the left or download the Grimace SDK and give it a spin.