A Study on Production of Personalized Programs with a Virtual Human Agent on the WWW

本研究项目的目的是开发一种环境，使我们能够在万维网上制作类似电视的节目，其中虚拟的人类代理充当主持人。我们首先扩展了我们的虚拟人演示系统，其动画语言以语音文本的形式与手势相关的嵌入式命令，使其在WWW上与日语兼容。其次，我们尝试自动生成动画天气报告，其中虚拟人扮演天气预报员，作为自动化电视节目制作的一个例子。我们的原型系统的输入是一组（地点、时间、天气）类型的天气预报数据。然后，系统通过聚类对数据进行汇总，并生成其案例框架表示。一组模板将这些表示翻译成带有嵌入手势候选词的日语文本。通过适当地选择手势候选项，可以获得天气报告的命令嵌入语音文本。从生成的语音文本中，扩展的虚拟人演示系统使虚拟人代理充当天气预报员，在实时三维动画中呈现与语音输出同步的天气图。实验结果表明，该系统能很好地在WWW上生成动画天气预报程序，证明了该方法的有效性。这项研究的结果在多媒体建模国际会议（MMM2000）上发表。

The purpose of this research project is to develop an environment which enables us to produce TV-like programs, where a virtual human agent acts as a presenter, on the World Wide Web (WWW).We first extended our virtual human presenter system, whose animation language is in the form of speech texts with gesture-related embedded commands, so that it works with Japanese language on the WWW.Secondly, we tried automatic generation of animated weather reports, where a virtual human performs as a weatherman, as an example of automated TV-like program production. An input to our prototype system is a set of (location, time, weather)-type weather forecast data. The system then summarizes the data by clustering and generates its case frame representations. A set of templates translates these representations into Japanese texts with embedded candidates of gestures. By selecting the gesture candidates appropriately, command-embedded speech texts for the weather reports are obtained. From the generated speech texts, the extended virtual human presenter system makes the virtual human agent act as a weatherman with weather charts in real-time 3D animation synchronized with speech outputs.Our experiments showed that the system well produces animated weather report programs on the WWW, and proved the validity of our approach. The results of this research were presented at the International Conference on Multimedia Modeling (MMM2000).