Motion synthesis and editing in low-dimensional spaces

Human motion is difficult to create and manipulate because of the high dimensionality and spatiotemporal nature of human motion data. Recently, tire use of large collections of captured motion data has added increased realism in character animation. In order to make the synthesis and analysis of motion data tractable, we present a low-dimensional motion space in which high-dimensional human motion can be effectively visualized, synthesized, edited, parameterized, and interpolated in both spatial and temporal domains. Our system allows users to create and edit the motion of animated characters in several ways: The user can sketch and edit a curve oil low-dimensional motion space, directly manipulate the character's pose in three-dimensional object space, or specify key poses to create in-between motions. Copyright (c) 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.