Papers about Body motion

With the development of the 3D technology, computer animation has widely applied in many areas such as biology, military affairs and network games etc. The virtual human as the most colorful factor in 3D animation world. Therefore, virtual human animation description language is a hot topic of current research. The contents included in the thesis are as follows:(1) The virtual human modeling in VRML. A virtual human modeling is completed according the H-Anim virtual human... Read more

The fast rendering of large-scale animated human crowds is a very important and interesting problem in research fields of virtual reality, it can be used to do analysis of animated human crowds’regular in museums, theatres, battlefields and so on, owning a bright future. It possesses two main features, one is that the rendering triangular patches are too much, the other is that the human skeletal structures are highly complicated. That makes the rendering of large-scale... Read more

In this report a number of research projects are summarized that aimed at investigating the emotional effects of android robots. In particular, those robots are focused on that have been developed and are incessantly being improved by Hiroshi Ishiguro at both the Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute International (ATR) in Kyoto and Osaka University in Osaka, Japan. Parts of the reported empirical research have been conducted by the author himself during a two-year research stay at ATR as post-doctoral... Read more

This paper describes an approach used to build a practical AI solution for a 3D boxing simulation game. The features of the designed AI agent are based on our deliberate concentration on believability, i.e. human-likeness of agent's behavior. We show how learning by observation and case-based reasoning techniques can be used to create an AI decision-making system for an industrial-level computer game. The chosen AI design principles support high usability and maintainability, which is important... Read more

Pedagogical agents – lifelike characters that guide users through multimedia learning environments – are intended to facilitate the learning process. According to social agency theory, the presentation of social cues (the image and voice of the agent) may prime the social interaction schema and cause the learner to deeply process the learning material. Research on pedagogical agents focuses mainly on either the role of the presence of pedagogical agents, by comparing agent and no-agent groups,... Read more

Elckerlyc is a BML Realizer for generating multimodal verbal and nonverbal behavior for Virtual Humans (VHs). The main characteristics of Elckerlyc are that (1) it is designed specifically for continuous interaction with tight temporal coordination between the behavior of a VH and its interaction partner; (2) it provides a mix between the precise temporal and spatial control offered by procedural animation and the physical realism of physical simulation; and (3) it is designed to be... Read more

Virtual humans are employed in many interactive applications using 3D virtual environments, including (serious) games. The motion of such virtual humans should look realistic (or ‘natural’) and allow interaction with the surroundings and other (virtual) humans. Current animation techniques differ in the trade-off they offer between motion naturalness and the control that can be exerted over the motion. We show mechanisms to parametrize, combine (on different body parts) and concatenate motions generated by different animation... Read more

Conversational agents that display many human qualities have become a valuable method business uses to communicate with online users to supply services or products, to help in online order process or to search the Web. The gaming industry and education may benefit from this type of interface. In this type of chats, users could have different alternatives: text display, photo of a real person, or a cartoon drawing and others. This is an exploratory study... Read more

Paper "The Persona Zero-Effect: Evaluating virtual character benefits on a learning task with repeated interactions" presents embodied agents, that have the potential to become a highly natural human-computer interaction device - they are already is use as tutors, presenters and assistants. However, it remains an open question whether adding an agent to an application has a measurable impact, positive or negative, in terms of motivation and learning performance. Prior studies are very diverse with respect... Read more

Embodied social agents are programmed to display human-like social behaviour to increase intuitiveness of interacting with these agents. It is not yet clear to what extent people respond to agents’ social behaviours. One example is touch. Despite robots’ embodiment and increasing autonomy, the effect of communicative touch has been a mostly overlooked aspect of human-robot interaction. This video-based, 2x2 between subject survey experiment (N=119) found that the combination of touch and proactivity influenced whether people... Read more