Animation guidelines for believable embodied conversational agent gestures

Abstract

In animating embodied conversational agents (ECAs), run-time blending of animations can provide a large library of movements that increases the appearance of naturalness while decreasing the number of animations to be developed. This approach avoids the need to develop a costly full library of possible animations in advance of use. Our principal scientific contribution is the development of a model for gesture constraints that enables blended animations to represent naturalistic movement. Rather than creating over-detailed, fine-grained procedural animations or hundreds of motion-captured animation files, animators can include sets of their own animations for agents, blend them, and easily reuse animations, while constraining the ECA to use motions that would occur and transition naturally.