Synthesis and Analysis Techniques for the Human Body: R&D Projects - 3D Modeling and Animation: Synthesis and Analysis Techniques for the Human Body - page 352

as a database of combined set of data, including 3D shape and the structure on
how to animate it.
The human modeling approach starts from default virtual human generic models,
including shape and animation structures, and the generic shape is transformed
into a new virtual model, according to the scanned body information (Figure 4)
(Katsounis, Thalman & Rodrian, 2002). For the generic body animation, a
walking motion obtained from a VICON TM motion captured system was
applied (Vicon, 2001). Six cameras with a simple rate of 120Hz are used along
25 mm markers.
Human Body Animation and Applications
Intelligent conversational avatar
This project is being developed by the HITLab at MIT. The purpose of this
project is to develop an Expert System and Natural Language Parsing module to
parse emotive expressions from textual input. The information will be then used
to set the graphical appearance of avatars in order to reduce the need to switch
between messages.
Technical Approach
The Expert System parses the text to get the emotions the user desires to portray,
taking into account cues present in text, such as: types of words used, contextual
information, length of phrases typed, use of emotions, etc.
An agent entity is causing the display of the emotions of the person who is typing
his text input. The agent is also propagating these emotions to a specific recipient.
The Expert System is used to characterize the agent and his/her emotional states.
Facts about emotional effects must be specified in terms of simple data
structures or unambiguous natural language (NL) statements (e.g., if one is
irritated, then further irritation can make the person angry) (Figure 5).
Figure 5. Emotional states (happy-unhappy).