Head motion animation using avatar gaze space

Animation plays a key role in adding realism to any graphical environment. In this work we present a technique for animating multiple avatars in a virtual environment designed to support remote collaboration between distributed work teams in which users are represented by avatars. There will be long periods of time when the user is not actively controlling the avatar and working on his official task. We need to animate his avatar with a `working-at-desk' animation that should be non-looping and sufficiently random for a single avatar as well as between multiple avatars to appear realistic. We present a technique for generating multiple head motions using (a) nonlinear dimensionality reduction and (b) gaze space images to control the motion. Our technique can automatically generate long sequences of motion without any user intervention. We present results from synthetic data.