Abstract
Continuous and synchronized whole-body motions are essential for achieving believable autonomous virtual humans in interactive applications.
We present a new motion control architecture based on generic controllers that can be hierarchically interconnected and reused in real-time. The hierarchical organization implies that leaf controllers are motion generators while the other nodes are connectors, performing operations such as interpolation, blending, and precise scheduling of children controllers.
We also describe how the system can correctly handle the synchronization of gestures with speech in order to achieve believable conversational characters. For that purpose, different types of controllers implement a generic model of the different phases of a gesture.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Badler, N.I., Phillips, C.B., Webber, B.L.: Simulating Humans: Computer Graphics, Animation and Control. Oxford University Press, Oxford (1993)
Watt, A., Watt, M.: Advanced Animation and Rendering Techniques. ACM Press, New York (1992)
Bodenheimer, B., Rose, C., Rosenthal, S., Pella, J.: The process of motion capture: Dealing with the data. In: Thalmann, D., van de Panne, M. (eds.) Computer Animation and Simulation 1997, pp. 3–18. Springer, NY (1997); Eurographics Animation Workshop
Thoroughman, K.A., Shadmehr, R.: Learning of action through combination of motor primitives. Nature 407, 742–747 (2000)
Boulic, R., Magnenat-Thalmann, N., Thalmann, D.: A global human walking model with real-time kinematic personification. The Visual Computer 6, 344–358 (1990)
Park, S.I., Shin, H.J., Shin, S.Y.: On-line locomotion generation based on motion blending. In: Proceedings of the ACM SIGGRAPH/Eurographics symposium on Computer animation (SCA), pp. 105–111. ACM Press, New York (2002)
Multon, F., France, L., Cani, M.-P., Debunne, G.: Computer animation of human walking: a survey. Journal of Visualization and Computer Animation 10, 39–54 (1999)
Kallmann, M.: Scalable solutions for interactive virtual humans that can manipulate objects. In: Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment (AIIDE), Marina del Rey, CA (2005)
Liu, Y., Badler, N.I.: Real-time reach planning for animated characters using hardware acceleration. In: Proceedings of Computer Animation and Social Agents (CASA 2003), pp. 86–93 (2003)
Kuffner, J.J., Latombe, J.-C.: Interactive manipulation planning for animated characters. In: Proceedings of Pacific Graphics 2000, Hong Kong (2000) (poster paper)
Baerlocher, P.: Inverse Kinematics Techniques for the Interactive Posture Control of Articulated Figures. PhD thesis, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, EPFL (2001); Thesis number 2383
Tolani, D., Badler, N.: Real-time inverse kinematics of the human arm. Presence 5, 393–401 (1996)
Granieri, J.P., Crabtree, J., Badler, N.I.: Production and playback of human figure motion for visual simulation. ACM Transactions on Modeling and Computer Simulation 5, 222–241 (1995)
Perlin, K., Goldberg, A.: Improv: A system for scripting interactive actors in virtual worlds. In: Proceedings of SIGGRAPH 1996, New Orleans, LA, pp. 205–216 (1996)
Boulic, R., Bécheiraz, P., Emering, L., Thalmann, D.: Integration of motion control techniques for virtual human and avatar real-time animation. In: Proceedings of the ACM International Symposium on Virtual Reality Software and Technology (VRST 1997), Switzerland, pp. 111–118 (1997)
Emering, L., Boulic, R., Molet, T., Thalmann, D.: Versatile tuning of humanoid agent activity. Computer Graphics Forum 19, 231–242 (2000)
Kallmann, M.: Interaction with 3-d objects. In: Magnenat-Thalmann, N., Thalmann, D. (eds.) Handbook of Virtual Humans, 1st edn., pp. 303–322. John Wiley & Sons, Chichester (2004)
Faloutsos, P., van de Panne, M., Terzopoulos, D.: Composable controllers for physics-based character animation. In: SIGGRAPH 2001: Proceedings of the 28th annual conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques, pp. 251–260. ACM Press, New York (2001)
Kopp, S., Wachsmuth, I.: Synthesizing multimodal utterances for conversational agents. Computer Animation and Virtual Worlds 15, 39–52 (2004)
Cassell, J., Vilhjálmsson, H.H., Bickmore, T.W.: Beat: the behavior expression animation toolkit. In: Proceedings of SIGGRAPH, pp. 477–486 (2001)
Carolis, B.D., Pelachaud, C., Poggi, I., de Rosis, F.: Behavior planning for a reflexive agent. In: Proceedings of the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI), Seattle (2001)
McNeill, D.: Hand and mind: What gestures reveal about thought. The university of Chicago Press (1992)
Grassia, S.: Practical parameterization of rotations using the exponential map. Journal of Graphics Tools 3, 29–48 (1998)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2005 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Kallmann, M., Marsella, S. (2005). Hierarchical Motion Controllers for Real-Time Autonomous Virtual Humans. In: Panayiotopoulos, T., Gratch, J., Aylett, R., Ballin, D., Olivier, P., Rist, T. (eds) Intelligent Virtual Agents. IVA 2005. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 3661. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/11550617_22
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/11550617_22
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-28738-4
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-28739-1
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)