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Interactive control of avatars animated with human motion data

Published: 01 July 2002 Publication History

Abstract

Real-time control of three-dimensional avatars is an important problem in the context of computer games and virtual environments. Avatar animation and control is difficult, however, because a large repertoire of avatar behaviors must be made available, and the user must be able to select from this set of behaviors, possibly with a low-dimensional input device. One appealing approach to obtaining a rich set of avatar behaviors is to collect an extended, unlabeled sequence of motion data appropriate to the application. In this paper, we show that such a motion database can be preprocessed for flexibility in behavior and efficient search and exploited for real-time avatar control. Flexibility is created by identifying plausible transitions between motion segments, and efficient search through the resulting graph structure is obtained through clustering. Three interface techniques are demonstrated for controlling avatar motion using this data structure: the user selects from a set of available choices, sketches a path through an environment, or acts out a desired motion in front of a video camera. We demonstrate the flexibility of the approach through four different applications and compare the avatar motion to directly recorded human motion.

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      cover image ACM Transactions on Graphics
      ACM Transactions on Graphics  Volume 21, Issue 3
      July 2002
      548 pages
      ISSN:0730-0301
      EISSN:1557-7368
      DOI:10.1145/566654
      Issue’s Table of Contents

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      Association for Computing Machinery

      New York, NY, United States

      Publication History

      Published: 01 July 2002
      Published in TOG Volume 21, Issue 3

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      Author Tags

      1. avatars
      2. human motion
      3. interactive control
      4. motion capture
      5. virtual environments

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