A virtual drama authoring system using real-time character animation

Computer graphics is developing day by day, and computer animation with 3D virtual character becomes usual. As this character animation is especially focused on humanoid and has fascinating factor, it is used in the variety of fields. To make a virtual character move realistically, motion capturing technique is introduced recently and has a great influence. Virtual reality techniques are often used in Internet applications, and there are many contents in which virtual characters appear. The desire to change the existing contents is occurred. Therefore, it is necessary to make new contents with character animation rapidly. But it takes long time to authoring contents with virtual character. Although motion capture technique helps the improvement of quality in contents, it could not reduce the authoring time, because most of motion capturing systems are separated from the authoring animation. In this paper, we propose an authoring system with motion device, which is used to make a content called virtual drama. To make the virtual drama as quick as possible, we integrate the variety of tracking devices (magnetic motion capture device, facial Tracker, data Glove and joystick) to acquire the data simultaneously, and implement the software that could animate the virtual character using data from these devices in real-time. Our system enables to support real-time feed back and shows the way to reduce the time and efforts in authoring virtual drama.