To view the following animations, your browser must have a VRML 97 plug-in installed. The animations are known to work with CosmoPlayer or Cortona.

All of these animations use stick figures. There are three reasons for this. Firstly, judging the quality of an animation requires a reasonably high frame rate, and on any given hardware, a simplified geometry allows a higher frame rate than a fully modelled and textured avatar. Secondly, I have found that for the purpose of developing animations, the stick figure allows a clearer view of the motion than the more realistic avatar. Thirdly, we do not currently have a VRML version of the Visia avatar. It should be stressed, though, that the stick figures are prototypes for development purposes, and not intended for the final user.

As yet we only animate the hands and arms. Facial animation is a subject of current work.

• Synthetic animation of a sequence of signs. (2Mb)
  This avatar performs a sequence of signs in a continuous loop. The signs are simply an arbitrary sequence, intended as examples of the animation. The sequence is:
  0 3 7 NAME ME B O B GOING-TO SHEET-OF-PAPER RED
  All signs are BSL (British Sign Language), with the exception of GOING-TO, which is DGS (German Sign Language).
• A motion-captured sequence. (600kb)
  For comparison, this is a replay of data captured from a human signer wired with sensors on the arms, hands, and face to record the movements. I don't actually know what she's signing, but it relates to a Post Office transaction.

You can click on the clock face to set the animation to any point in the cycle, or click and drag on the clock face to move it through the cycle by hand. The buttons to the left of the clock act as follows:

1. Speed up the motion by about 40%. (Click twice to double the speed.)
2. Revert to normal speed.
3. Slow down the motion by about 40%. (Click twice to halve the speed.)
4. Reverse the direction of time.
5. Stop or start.
6. (If present.) Turn on or off the display of the "significant points" of the avatar: a grid of points in the signing space in front of the avatar, points on the face, and points on each hand.

Clicking and dragging anywhere else in the scene will rotate the avatar. The VRML plug-in you have installed will also allow you to move your viewpoint through the scene.

On a 500 MHz Pentium III laptop with an ATI graphics card, and the DirectX renderer selected in CosmoPlayer, this demo runs at 20 to 30 frames per second. The graphics card is probably more important than the processor speed in determining the achievable frame rate. Note that the animations always run in real time, regardless of the hardware: a faster machine gives a smoother rendering of the same motion.