Design and Implementation of a Voice-Driven Animation System

This thesis presents a novel multimodal interface for directing the actions of computer animated characters and camera movements. Our system can recognize human voice input combined with mouse pointing to generate desired character animation based on motion capture data. We compare our voice-driven system with a button-driven animation interface that has equivalent capabilities. An informal user study has indicated that our voice-user interface (VUI) is faster and simpler for the users than traditional graphical user interface (GUI). The advantage of VUI is more obvious when creating complex and high-detailed character animation. Applications for our system include creating computer character animation in short movies, directing characters in video games, storyboarding for film or theatre, and scene reconstruction.