Next: Virtual Humans
Virtual Humans for Animation, Ergonomics, and Simulation
Norman Badler
Center for Human Modeling and Simulation
Department of Computer and Information Science
University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia, PA 19104-6389
badler@central.cis.upenn.edu
Abstract:
The last few years have seen great maturation in the computation
speed and control methods needed to portray 3D virtual humans suitable for
real interactive applications. We first describe the state of the art, then
focus on the particular approach taken at the University of Pennsylvania with
the Jack system. Various aspects of real-time virtual humans are
considered, such as appearance and motion, interactive control, autonomous
action, gesture, attention, locomotion, and multiple individuals. The
underlying architecture consists of a sense-control-act structure that permits
reactive behaviors to be locally adaptive to the environment, and a
``PaT-Net'' parallel finite-state machine controller that can be used to drive
virtual humans through complex tasks. Finally, we argue for a deep connection
between language and animation and describe current efforts in linking them
through the JackMOO extension to lambdaMOO.
Dr. Norman Badler
Thu Apr 17 08:17:25 EDT 1997