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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. |
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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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publication
The ideas behind this work and others is discussed in a workshop paper.
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This
technique maps the two-dimensional movement of the pen's motion
on the tablet to the the motion of an avatar's arm in virtual
three-dimensional space. The avatar's motion is necessarily
simple. Yet, this smooth motion which responds to the slightest
movement of the pen's tip, can also be quite expressive and
graceful. As any puppeteer or dancer can explain, even very
simple motion, when combined with appropriate timing and intent,
is rendered meaningful and evocative.