Graceful Anytime Interruptability for Virtual Agents

Master-Thesis

Animation of embodied agents’ conversational gestures has to deal with a multitude of requirements. As the scene is moving towards real-time rendered interactive applications, motions cannot longer be assembled by static keyframing, but has to be procedurally generated, according to situation-dependent continuously changing requirements. As naturalness means variation, animation data has be be randomized or parameterized to be reusable. We present a way to operate on traditionally produced keyframe animation, while introducing parameterization and randomization and, as the key feature of this work, address the problem of instantaneous motion interruption handling, following a hybrid approach, combining keyframe techniques and spline-curve motion interpolation. Additionally, we will discuss how to integrate internal state dependent agent behavior in multimodal interactive virtual presentation applications to the Multimodal Presentation Markup Language (MPML) with varying levels of behavior control.

Advisor(s)