Universität Bielefeld - Technische Fakultät - AG Wissensbasierte Systeme

I. Wachsmuth & S. Kopp:
Lifelike Gesture Synthesis and Timing for Conversational Agents.

In I. Wachsmuth & T. Sowa (eds.): Gesture and Sign Language in Human-Computer Interaction (pp. 120-133).
Berlin: Springer (LNAI 2298), 2002.

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Abstract:

Synchronization of synthetic gestures with speech output is one of the
goals for embodied conversational agents which have become a new paradigm
for the study of gesture and for human-computer interface. In this context,
this contribution presents an operational model that enables lifelike
gesture animations of an articulated figure to be rendered in real-time
from representations of spatiotemporal gesture knowledge. Based on various
findings on the production of human gesture, the model provides means for
motion representation, planning, and control to drive the kinematic skeleton
of a figure which comprises 43 degrees of freedom in 29joints for the main
body and 20 DOF for each hand. The model is conceived to enable cross-modal
synchrony with respect to the coordination of gestures with the signal
generated by a text-to-speech system.