Interactive Demonstration of Pointing Gestures for Virtual Trainers

While interactive virtual humans are becoming widely used in education, training and delivery of instructions, building the animations required for such interactive characters in a given scenario remains a complex and time consuming work. One of the key problems is that most of the systems controlling virtual humans are mainly based on pre-defined animations which have to be re-built by skilled animators specifically for each scenario. In order to improve this situation this paper proposes a framework based on the direct demonstration of motions via a simplified and easy to wear set of motion capture sensors. The proposed system integrates motion segmentation, clustering and interactive motion blending in order to enable a seamless interface for programming motions by demonstration.