Human Figure Animation

Interacting Modules

• The ones identified– Speech, face, emotion

• Plus others:– Perception– Physiological states

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

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

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

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

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

Interaction with Other Modules

• Body and face have parallel access to high level information