Virtual humans in virtual environments a new view of multimedia applications

Telepresence is the future of multimedia systems and will allow participants to share professional and private experiences, meetings, games, parties. The sense of "presence " in the virtual environment is an important requirement for collaborativ

Virtual Humans in Virtual Environments:

A New View of Multimedia Applications*

Daniel Thalmann

Computer Graphics Lab (LIG), Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL)

CH-1015 Lausanne, Switzerland

Telepresence is the future of multimedia systems and will allow participants to share professional andprivate experiences, meetings, games, parties. The sense of "presence" in the virtual environment is animportant requirement for collaborative activities involving multiple remote users working with socialinteractions. Using virtual humans within the shared environment is a essential supporting tool forpresence. We will need in the future real-time realistic 3D avatars, but also interactive perceptive actorsto populate the Virtual Worlds.

1 From Multimedia to Telepresence

Traditional multimedia systems are systems that handle different forms of data, such as texts, audio, orvideo. Until recently, the Web has represented a typical traditional multimedia system with HTML texts,gif images and Quicktime or MPEG movies, then came VRML the Virtual Reality Modelling Language:a way of creating 3D scenes allowing the Web users to walk through 3D spaces. VRML supports theintegration of Virtual Reality with the World Wide Web with the goal of broadening access to VRenvironments via the WWW infrastructure. More generally, Virtual Environments define a new interfacefor networked multimedia applications. Users will be able to move in Virtual Spaces where they can findmany virtual objects including virtual humans. These virtual objects should be multimedia objects. Forexample, a virtual human should be a 3D graphical object, but also an object able to speak or emitsounds. A virtual dog should be able not only to move, but also to bark

Europe Union has published six reports on Visionary Research. One of the reports [1] is entitled “FromMultimedia to Telepresence”. The purpose of this document is to identify visions in the area of the futuremultimedia systems and the technologies associated to these visions. Seven “key visions” have beenidentified as clusters of elementary visions. Figure 1 shows a diagram with the 7 key visions and theelementary visions. We just want to discuss a little more the second and the third key visions, thinkingthat their integration will be the future of multimedia systems.

Intelligent storage and retrieval

of multimedia informationIntelligent contents-based

storage and retrieval

Efficient headlines browsing

Unstructured and fuzzy retrieval

Reference-driven retrieval

Virtual and distributedcompaniesCivic rights and dutiesOpen electronic market and flea-marketsVirtual people

Fig. 1. Seven key visions

*Published in Proc. Intern. Workshop on Synthetic - Natural Hybrid Coding and Three Dimensional Imaging,Rhodes, 1997, pp. 3-7