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A Knowledge-based Approach for Lifelike Gesture Animation

Stefan Kopp, Ipke Wachsmuth

The inclusion of additional modalities into the communicative behavior of virtual agents besides speech has moved into focus of human-computer interface researchers, as humans are more likely to consider computer-generated figures lifelike when appropriate nonverbal behaviors are displayed in addition to speech. In this paper, we propose a knowledge-based approach for the automatic generation of gesture animations for an articulated figure. It combines a formalism for the representation of spatiotemporal gesture features, methods for planning individual gestural animations w.r.t. to form and timing, and formation of arm trajectories. Finally, enhanced methods for rendering animations from motor programs are incorporated in the execution of planned gestures. The approach is targetted to achieve a great variety of gestures as well as a higher degree of lifelikeness in synthetic agents.

Keywords: Lifelike and Believable Characters, Intelligent User Interfaces

Citation: Stefan Kopp, Ipke Wachsmuth: A Knowledge-based Approach for Lifelike Gesture Animation. In W.Horn (ed.): ECAI2000, Proceedings of the 14th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence, IOS Press, Amsterdam, 2000, pp.663-667.


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ECAI-2000 is organised by the European Coordinating Committee for Artificial Intelligence (ECCAI) and hosted by the Humboldt University on behalf of Gesellschaft für Informatik.