Skip to main content
Log in

Virtual human animation in natural language visualisation

  • Published:
Artificial Intelligence Review Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

Simulation motion of Virtual Reality (VR) objects and humans has experienced important developments in the last decade. However, realistic virtual human animation generation remains a major challenge, even if applications are numerous, from VR games to medical training. This paper proposes different methods for animating virtual humans, including blending simultaneous animations of various temporal relations with multiple animation channels, minimal visemes for lip synchronisation, and space sites of virtual human and 3D object models for object grasping and manipulation. We present our work in our natural language visualisation (animation) system, CONFUCIUS, and describe how the proposed approaches are employed in CONFUCIUS’ animation engine.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Similar content being viewed by others

References

  • Alexa M, Behr J, Miller W (2000) The morph node. In: Proceedings of Web3d/VRML 2000. Monterey, pp. 29–34

  • Allen JF (1983). Maintaining knowledge about temporal intervals. Commun ACM 26(11): 832–843

    Article  MATH  Google Scholar 

  • Babski C (2000) Humanoids on the Web. Ph.D. Thesis, Computer Graphics Lab (LIG), Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL)

  • Badler NI, Philips CB, Webber BL (1993) Simulating humans. Oxford University Press

  • Cadoz C (1994). Les realites virtuelles. Dominos-Flammarion, Paris

    Google Scholar 

  • Campos J, Hornsby K, Egenhofer M (2002) A temporal model of virtual reality objects and their semantics. In: DMSA 2002: eighth international conference on distributed multimedia systems. Redwood City, September, pp. 581–588

  • CSLU (2006) http://cslu.cse.ogi.edu/toolkit/index.html

  • Dijkstra EW (1971). Hierarchical ordering of sequential processes. Acta Informatica 1(2): 115–138

    Article  MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  • H-Anim (2001) Humanoid animation working group. http://www.h-anim.org

  • Huang Z, Eliens A, Visser C (2002) STEP: a scripting lan-guage for embodied agents. In: Proceedings of the workshop on lifelike animated agents, Tokyo, pp. 46–51

  • Jackendoff R (1990). Semantic structures. Current studies in linguistics series. MIT Press, Cambridge

    Google Scholar 

  • Kallmann M and Thalmann D (2002). Modeling behaviors of interactive objects for real time virtual environments. J Visual Lang Comput 13(2): 177–195

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Lander J (1999) Inverse kinematics for real-time games. In: Game developer conference 1999. http://www.darwin3d.com/confpage.htm

  • Ma M, Mc Kevitt P (2004a) Interval relations in visual semantics of verbs. Artif Intell Rev 21(3–4):293–316, Special Issue on Research in Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science (AICS-04), Kluwer-Academic Publishers, Dordrecht

    Google Scholar 

  • Ma M, Mc Kevitt P (2004b) Visual semantics and ontology of eventive verbs. Natural language processing—IJCNLP-04. In: Su K-Y, Tsujii J-I, Lee J-H, Kwong OY (eds) First international joint conference, Hainan Island, China, Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence March 22–24, pp. 187–196, (LNAI) series, LNCS 3248. Springer Verlag, Berlin

  • Marriott A, Beard S, Stallo J, Huynh Q (2001) VHML: virtual human modelling language. http://www.vhml.org

  • Perlin K, Goldberg A (1996) Improv: a system for scripting interactive actors in virtual worlds. In: Proceedings of the 23rd annual conference on computer graphics and interactive techniques SIGGRAPH ‘96. ACM Press, New York, pp. 205–216

  • Su A, Furuta R (1994) A specification of 3D manipulations in virtual environments. In: Proceedings of the fourth international symposium on measurement and control in robotics: topical workshop on virtual reality. NASA Conference Publication 10163, Houston, November, pp. 64–68

  • Szarowicz A, Francik J (2004) Human motion for virtual people, In: International conference on computer games: artificial intelligence, design and education. CGAIDE, Reading

  • Vendler Z (1967). Linguistics and philosophy. Cornell University Press, Ithaca

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Minhua Ma.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article

Ma, M., Mc Kevitt, P. Virtual human animation in natural language visualisation. Artif Intell Rev 25, 37–53 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10462-007-9042-5

Download citation

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10462-007-9042-5

Keywords

Navigation