Papers about Gestures

In this paper, we present our current study on the design of a virtual agent able to express sentences in Sign Language (SL), so-called 'Virtual Signer', in the context of interactive web-based applications. Up now, little work has been carried out on web-based virtual signers. As for current research on virtual signers in standalone applications, it relies on two main approaches: Pre-synthesized animations based on motion capture or rotoscoping, and generated animations, with very little interactivity.... Read more

Over the past decade, motion capture data has become a popular research tool, and motion databases have grown exponentially. Indexing, querying, and retrieving data has thus become more difficult, and has necessitated innovative approaches to using these databases. Our aim is to make this approach feasible for virtual agents signing in French Sign Language (LSF), taking into account the semantic information implicitly contained in language data. We thus structure a database in two autonomous units,... Read more

Effective speakers engage their whole body when they gesture. It is difficult, however, to create such full body motion in animated agents while still supporting a large and flexible gesture set. This paper presents a hybrid system that combines motion capture data with a procedural animation system for arm gestures. Procedural approaches are well suited to supporting a large and easily modified set of gestures, but are less adept at producing subtle, full body movement.... Read more

Embodied agents are a powerful paradigm for current and future multimodal interfaces, yet require high effort and expertise for their creation, assembly and animation control. Therefore, open animation engines and high-level control languages are required to make embodied agents accessible to researchers and developers. In this paper, we present EMBR, a new realtime character animation engine that offers a high degree of animation control via the EMBRScript language. We argue that a new layer of... Read more

In this paper, a new low-dimensional motion model that can parameterize human motion style is presented. Based on this model, a human motion synthesis approach by using constrainted optimization in a low-dimensional space is proposed. We define a new inverse kinematics solver in this low-dimensional space to generate the required motions meeting user-defined space constraints at key-frames. Our approach can also allow users to edit motion style explicitly by specifying the style parameter. The experimental... Read more

This paper presents an architecture for an intelligent virtual agent that imitates human drumming behaviour. Through imitation, the agent models the user-specific variations that constitute the "groove" of the drummer. The architecture comprises a motor system that imitates arm movements of a human drummer, and a sound system that produces the sound of the human playing style. The presence of a sound system alleviates the need to use physical models that will create sound when... Read more

Basic communication and coordination mechanisms of human social interaction are assumed to be mediated by perception-action links. These links ground the observation and understanding of others in one's own action generation system, as evidenced by immediate motor resonances to perceived behavior. We present a model to endow virtual embodied agents with similar properties of embodied perception. With a focus of hand-arm gesture, the model comprises hierarchical levels of motor representation (commands, programs, schemas) that are... Read more

Recent studies have shown that virtual humans can facilitate social interactions among people who have difficulty in forming social bonds or help develop their social skills by interaction with virtual practice. Virtual human research tends to focus exclusively on appearance or behavior in assessing agent effectiveness, whereas other studies of human social interaction emphasize aspects of the social context, such as anticipated future interaction (AFI) which has been implicated as a key moderator of people's... Read more

Expressing spatial information with iconic gestures is abundant in human communication and requires to transform a referent representation into resembling gestural form. This task is challenging as the mapping is determined by the visuo-spatial features of the referent, the overall discourse context as well as concomitant speech, and its outcome varies considerably across different speakers. We present a framework, GNetIc, that combines data-driven with model-based techniques to model the generation of iconic gestures with Bayesian... Read more

Multimodal user interfaces are becoming more and more important in human-machine communication. Essential representatives of such interfaces are virtual agents that aim to act like humans in the way they employ gestures, facial expression, posture and prosody to convey their emotions in face-to-face communication. Furthermore, if we employ a presentation team [1] to convey facts, the performance becomes more entertaining for the audience. Distinct characters should have different roles and personality profiles. Moreover if we... Read more