Production and playback of human figure motion for 3D virtual environments

We describe a system for off-line production and real-time playback of motion for articulated human figures in 3D virtual environments. The key notions are (1) the logical storage of full-body motion in posture graphs, which provides a simple motion access method for playback and (2) mapping the motions of higher DOF figures to lower DOF figures using slaving to provide human models at several levels of detail, both to geometry and articulation, for later playback. We present our system in the context of a simple problem: animating human figures in a distributed simulation, using DIS protocols for communicating the human state information. We also discuss several related techniques for real-time animation of articulated figures in visual simulation.