The Virtual Sailor: Synthetic Humans for Virtual Environments.
Abstract
In many virtual environment (VE) applications, e.g., a VE system for training personnel to perform multi-person maintenance tasks, the VE System must be able to display accurate models of human figures that can perform routine behaviors and adapt to events in the virtual world. In order to achieve such adaptive, task level interaction with virtual actors, it is necessary to model elementary human motor skills. SkillBuilder is a software system for constructing a set of motor behaviors for a virtual actor by designing motor programs for arbitrarily complicated skills. Motor programs are modeled using finite state machines, and we have categorized a set of transition and ending conditions. Using inverse kinematics and automatic collision avoidance, we use SkillBuilder to construct a suite of behaviors for simulating visually guided reaching, grasping, and head/eye tracking motions for a kinematically simulated actor consisting of rigid body parts. All of these actions have been successfully demonstrated in real-time by permitting the user to interact with the virtual environment using a whole-hand input device.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Apr 20, 1995
- Accession Number
- ADA293560
Entities
People
- David L. Zeltzer
Organizations
- Massachusetts Institute of Technology