A Parameterized Schema for Representing Complex Gesture Forms

Gestures can take on complex forms that convey both pragmatic and expressive information. When creating virtual agents, it is necessary to make fine grained manipulations of these forms to precisely adjust the gesture’s meaning to reflect the communicative content an agent is trying to deliver, character mood and spatial arrangement of the characters and objects. This paper describes a gesture schema that affords the required, rich description of gesture form. Novel features include the representation of multiphase gestures consisting of several segments, repetitions of gesture form, a map of referential locations and a rich set of spatial and orientation constraints. In our prototype implementation, gestures are generated from this representation by editing and combining small snippets of motion captured data to meet the specification. This allows a very diverse set of gestures to be generated from a small set of input data. Gestures can be refined by simply adjusting the parameters of the schema.