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

Pfinder is a real-time system for tracking people and interpreting their behavior. It runs at 10Hz on a standard SGI Indy computer, and has performed reliably on thousands of people in many different physical locations. The system uses a multiclass statistical model of color and shape to obtain a 2

A comprehensive survey of computer vision-based human motion capture literature from the past two decades is presented. The focus is on a general overview based on a taxonomy of system functionalities, broken down into four processes: initialization, tracking, pose estimation, and recognition. Each

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Improv is a system for the creation of real-time behavior-based animated actors. There have been several recent efforts to build network distributed autonomous agents. But in general these efforts do not focus on the author's view. To create rich interactive worlds inhabited by believable

Recent years have witnessed the birth of a new paradigm for learning environments: animated pedagogical agents. These lifelike autonomous characters cohabit learning environments with students to create rich, face-to-face learning interactions. This opens up exciting new possibilities; for example

Webster’s dictionary defines an avatar as “the incarnation of a Hindu deity”.

The Behavior Expression Animation Toolkit (BEAT) allows animators to input typed text that they wish to be spoken by an animated human figure, and to obtain as output appropriate and synchronized nonverbal behaviors and synthesized speech in a form that can be sent to a number of different

Abstract. Supporting awareness of others is an idea that holds promise for improving the usability of real-time distributed groupware. However, there is little principled information available about awareness that can be used by groupware designers. In this article, we develop a descriptive theory

We are interested in designing systems that support communication and collaboration among large groups of people over computer networks. We begin by asking what properties of the physical world support graceful human-human communication in face-to-face situations, and argue that it is possible