A human touch for Internet training: the Virtual Professor

The Virtual Internet Professor walks into the Virtual Classroom and interacts with Virtual Students. A serious bottleneck today with online learning is the absence of a human trainer/instructor/professor. Researchers have been striving to achieve realistic, real time animation and found to be beyond reach with today's technology. Achieving autonomous, realistic and real time whole human animation of virtual humans and Internet avatars who can perform complex tasks, interact with avatars and real humans as they appear and behave is the goal of this research. We propose thrust areas and critical regions that need to be tackled to achieve the stated goal of a realistic Virtual Professor.