DoodlerA graceful and intuitive interaction technique for controlling gesturing avatars. |
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Idea Gesturing with an avatar should be as simple as doodling on a piece of paper. To explore this concept, I created this prototype for controlling the free flowing gestural arm movements of an avatar by doodling on a graphics tablet. (It also works with a regular mouse.) Communicative gestures are often creations of the moment, generated spontaneously to accompany a singular utterance within a particular context. In this interaction technique the user's spontaneous and continuous motion is reflected meaningfully in the avatar's motion. |
Expressive, Constrained movement
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Insights from gesture research Human gestural motion often follows a particular pattern: just before someone gestures, they will raise their arm from a resting position into a into a ready position; then the gestural motion proceeds; finally, the arm returns to the rest position. The doodler technique mimics this motion. When the pen touches the tablet, the avatar arm moves to a ready position. After the pen is raised, the avatar lowers its arm to a resting position. |
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Demo You can try using doodler. Doodler runs as a Java applet that interacts with a VRML browser. You will need a Java enabled web browser and a VRML browser to try it out. It has been successfully tested with IE6.0 with the Cortona VRML browser plug-in. You can also download the source code here (31 KB). It requires the VRML EAI package. |
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Related
publication
The ideas behind this work and others is discussed in a workshop paper.
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This page last modified 18 December, 2002