Human Figure Animation

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Human Figure Animation
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Interacting Modules

• The ones identified
• Speech, face, emotion
• Plus others
• Perception
• Physiological states

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Point of Departure H-Anim Spec

• Why not view the body as an H-Anim MPEG-4 player?
• To some extent you can
• Need to be able to describe body actions as
  H-Anim parameters if need be
• But the body usually needs to do more
• Execute behaviors
• Perform behaviors autonomously (e.g., breathe)
• Perform simple arbitration between behaviors

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Different Bodies with Different Capabilities

• We envision bodies with different degrees of
  autonomous control
• Bodies executing behaviors in fixed ways
• Bodies able to adjust their behavior according to
  the current emotions of the character
• Goal use same interface, but behavior depends
  upon capabilities of the particular virtual human
  body
• Possible mechanism extensible markup languages

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Principle Full Access to State and Controls

• Body has access to high-level information (e.g.,
  emotion, mood, planned future actions) if it
  needs it
• No architectural restrictions on information
  access
• Cognition can choose to control behavior at high
  level or low level

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Example Gesture Generation

• Body may need to know planned points of emphasis
  in the speech stream, so that it can time
  gestures to coincide
• Or defer responsibility to cognition if it is
  unable to do this

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Example Angry Steve

• Student pulls out dipstick while Steve is
  demonstrating another step
• Steve needs to decide whether to show anger to
  the student
• Cognition decides whether to reveal anger to the
  body

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Interaction with Other Modules

• Body and face have parallel access to high level
  information