Animation Support for Networked Virtual Environments

This paper presents animation techniques and issues involved in virtual environments where the participants interact with each other through a network. The state of the participant should be recognized at each local site, and broadcast to the other sites. Because information exchange is minimal, animation techniques are applied to convert the incoming low DOF parameters into high DOF joint angles that completely determine the configuration of the agents at each frame. As a case study, a software system VRLOCO is introduced, which has been developed by the author over the last five years. From a simple stream of body center positions, VRLOCO generates realistic curved path human locomotion in real-time. Based on the heading direction and speed, the locomotion automatically switches among five different primitives: walking, running, lateral stepping, backward stepping, and turnaround. The techniques presented here proved robust and faithful: the algorithm is not sensitive to the noise in the data, and the resulting animation conforms well with the original data.