Piavca: A framework for heterogeneous interactions with virtual characters

Abstract

Animated virtual humans are a vital part of many virtual environments today. Of particular interest are virtual human that we can interact with in some approximation of social interaction. However, creating characters that we can interact with believably is an extremely complex problem. Part of this difficulty is that human interaction is highly multi-modal. This multi-modality implies that there will be a great variety of ways of interacting with a virtual character. The diverse styles of interaction also imply diverse methods of generating behavior. For example animation can be played back from motion capture, generated procedurally, or generated by transforming existing motion capture © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.