As virtual humans take on more important roles in the digital universe, real-world designers are getting the tools that lend them more control in shaping their digital brethren.
At the third annual Virtual Humans conference this week in Universal City, California, these 3-D avatars are jumping, smiling, and conversing with each other in a virtual human powwow.
Computer-generated simulations of people have already infiltrated industry, and are especially popular in manufacturing and military. Generally, the virtual humans act as crash-test dummies, walking through a machine assembly or repair operation, helping to identify and resolve problems before they occur in a real-world setting. More recently, virtual humans have also started to appear as smart opponents in games and as friendly hosts on Web sites.
"Virtual humans are being increasingly deployed in industry because the technology is now accessible, and they no longer need to be developed by the users," said Norman Badler, director of the Center for Human Modeling and Simulation at the University of Pennsylvania. "Many of the early human models were created by necessity by the users themselves and now that the hardware technology exists, software tools are arriving to support the designers' role," he added.
In the past, the rule of thumb has been the better the simulation, the heftier the hardware requirements. And still today, the most expressive simulations -- such as those created by Nadia Thalman SP and her assistants at the University of Geneva's Miralab -- are best experienced as videos. But that's changing, and the creation or manipulation of a virtual human is now possible on a Pentium-based PC.
The problem with most computer-based characters, said Peter Plantec, president of Virtual Personalities Inc., is that they're boring. "We've got to start putting some personalities and humor into our stuff," he told the mostly technical crowd.
Virtual Personalities' software builds characters by means of a scriptable "verbot engine." In "scripting" a personality, which is similar to HTML coding, a designer can make links between statements and responses using simple letter and number codes for such things as frequency of responses. And just like so many of your friends and family, the verbots respond to key words or rules. For example, a sexual comment from the human interlocutor might elicit increasingly acerbic responses as it's repeated. The reason so many virtual humans are dull, he said, is that simulation efforts have concentrated on improving verisimilitude and realistic representations, while character development has played second fiddle. At this point, very few virtual humans have scriptable personalities, and the majority are used in motion-analysis applications.
The appearance of several new authoring tools, however, is expected to open the door for more design and content players to add personality features to virtual humans in the future.
Stephen Lane, president of Katrix Inc., demonstrated NeurRule technology, an authoring system which will premiere at Siggraph '98. The tool combines three methods of animation: key framing, motion capture, and procedural algorithms. It will include a ClipSmarts library of re-usable and modifiable characters, and objects created with the tool can also be saved or used as plug-ins for high-end 3-D modeling products, like Alias Wavefront Maya, SoftImage, and Kinetics Studio Max. Microsoft, Disney, and Intel have already licensed the technology.
Haptek Inc. showed off characters with extremely fluid and expressive movement. Company spokesperson Chris Shaw said Haptek has focused on visual expression rather than artificial intelligence, and they'll let other companies build in the personality. Haptek's optimization system delivers small file sizes without loss of aesthetics. The proof is in the two free characters available for download at its Web site, which can be run on PCs. Shaw also gave the conference a sneak peek at a modeling tool with a very easy, grab-and-shape interface which will be released and marketed by an undisclosed third party before the end of the year.
Jack, a mannequin made by Transom Technologies, is used for ergonomic studies, motion analysis, and training simulations. It's in wide use in the transportation industry by such companies as Caterpillar and John Deere. A new wrinkle is the TJ Toolkit -- a stripped-down version for producing syn-folk who can be integrated into third-party 3-D modeling applications. It's employed by Engineering Animation Inc. as part of their VisMockup engineering environment. Transom Jack 2.0 is an improved authoring tool for creating multiple Jacks or Jills and placing them into a 3-D environment with which they can interact.
If it's crowds you want, Gibb Ltd. has connected the Arrive/Depart application to Superscape's virtual-reality authoring environment to let designers and planners analyze how passengers will move through airports.
Just so long as virtual Hari Krishnas are in the mix.
