| Budget Amount *help |
¥3,300,000 (Direct Cost: ¥3,300,000)
Fiscal Year 2000: ¥800,000 (Direct Cost: ¥800,000)
Fiscal Year 1999: ¥2,500,000 (Direct Cost: ¥2,500,000)
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| Research Abstract |
The purpose of this research project is to develop an environment which enables us to produce TV-like programs, where a virtual human agent acts as a presenter, on the World Wide Web (WWW).
We first extended our virtual human presenter system, whose animation language is in the form of speech texts with gesture-related embedded commands, so that it works with Japanese language on the WWW.Secondly, we tried automatic generation of animated weather reports, where a virtual human performs as a weatherman, as an example of automated TV-like program production. An input to our prototype system is a set of (location, time, weather)-type weather forecast data. The system then summarizes the data by clustering and generates its case frame representations. A set of templates translates these representations into Japanese texts with embedded candidates of gestures. By selecting the gesture candidates appropriately, command-embedded speech texts for the weather reports are obtained. From the generated speech texts, the extended virtual human presenter system makes the virtual human agent act as a weatherman with weather charts in real-time 3D animation synchronized with speech outputs.
Our experiments showed that the system well produces animated weather report programs on the WWW, and proved the validity of our approach. The results of this research were presented at the International Conference on Multimedia Modeling (MMM2000).
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