Abstract

This talk will describe current work at UCL that is concerned with animated characters in virtual reality. It will start by describing the background to research at UCL in terms of Presence research and then the technology used to animate the characters will be described. This is centred on the Piavca character animation engine that contains extensive features for real time composition and manipulation of motion data. Much of the work at UCL centres around expressive non-verbal communication and we have developed an engine for generation of believable body language. The talk will end with a description of current and planned future work.