Real-time intelligent generation of human behaviours for interactive virtual environments

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Interactive virtual environments are rapidly growing in many applications from arts and entertainment to scientific simulation, education, and the service industry. Human characters play a significant role in most of these applications. Historically, character animation is done by the traditional technique of key-framing or recently motion capture for more complicated movements. Regardless of the technique, the majority of animated behaviours in interactive or non-interactive multimedia applications are simply play-back of pre-recorded or pre-animated sequences. This inability of the systems to generate realistic behaviours limits the applications in terms of their ability to respond to user interactions in real-time by creating appropriate content. Even in non-interactive applications like animated films, there is minimum support from an intelligent animation software, and automating the process of character animation will reduce the production cost and effort, and provides animators with a more effective and systematic way to generate content. This proposal aims at creating a framework that adds knowledge and intelligence to character animation systems. This will be achieved through behavioural experiments and modeling to understand common human actions including but not limited to facial expressions, simple full-body movements, and more complicated actions such as dancing. The next step of the research will be to develop the software framework that uses the computational power of modern systems and allows using the behavioural models in order to create those actions in real time in a realistic and perceptually valid way. Finally we use the framework to create sample applications particularly educational virtual environments and also computer games and animated films. Major contributions of the proposed research will be the ability to create dynamic actions, freedom from pre-recording massive amount of animation using expensive motion capture equipment and artists, more realistic environments through perceptually valid and "personalized" virtual characters, and better understanding of human behaviours such as the effect of emotional state on facial and full-body actions