A dead-reckoning algorithm for virtual human figures

In networked virtual environments; when the participants are represented by virtual human figures, the articulated structure of the human body introduces a new complexity in the usage of the network resources. This might create a significant overhead in communication, especially as the number of participants in the;simulation increases. In addition, the animation should be realistic, as it is easy to recognize anomalies in the virtual human animation. This requires real-time algorithms to decrease the network overhead, while considering characteristics of body motion. The dead-reckoning technique is a way to decrease the number of messages communicated among the participants, and has been used for simple non-articulated objects in popular systems. In this paper, we introduce a dead-reckoning technique for articulated virtual human figures based on Kalman filtering, and discuss main issues and present experimental results.