2000 Fiscal Year Final Research Report Summary
A Study on Production of Personalized Programs with a Virtual Human Agent on the WWW
| Project/Area Number |
11680418
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| Research Category |
Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C)
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| Allocation Type | Single-year Grants |
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| Section | 一般 |
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| Research Field |
情報システム学(含情報図書館学)
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| Research Institution | Kyushu Institute of Technology |
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Principal Investigator |
NOMA Tsukasa Kyushu Institute of Technology, Department of Artificial Intelligence, Associate Professor, 情報工学部, 助教授 (60228351)
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| Co-Investigator(Kenkyū-buntansha) |
BABA Hiromi Kinki University, Kyushu School of Engineering, Assistant Professor (60284593)
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| Project Period (FY) |
1999 – 2000
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| Keywords | virtual human agent / human body animation / WWW / presentation / contents generation / weather report |
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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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