Virtual RoboCup: Real-time 3D visualization of 2D soccer games

Abstract

Virtual RoboCup is a real-time 3D visualization tool for 2D simulated soccer games as played in the RoboCup simulation league.Players are modeled as anthropmorphic gures and animated step-keepingly with the underlying 2D simulation. Important aspects of player animation concern the generation of natural 3D player movements and realistic player-ball interactions during kicks. A key contribution of Virtual RoboCup is its novel approach to task-level animation in which task-level directives for 3D animation of anthropomorphic characters are generated via on-line classication of fast paced 2D simulation data. As further contribution, we investigated to what extend human observers perceptually process the level of detail in Virtual RobCup animations. A psychological experiment was designed to test the effectiveness of 3D body animation. Although observers failed to notice differences in animation detail, clear effects of character animation on perceived skill were found. The experiment conrms that is is very well justied to spend valuable computational resources on naturalness and richness of detail in realtime character animation.