During the 1980s, the academic establishment paid only scant attention to research on the animation of virtual humans. Today, however, almost every graphics journal, popular magazine, or newspaper devotes some space to Virtual Humans and their applications. But, there are still a lot of problems to generate believable Virtual Humans. The purpose of this paper is to identify ten main problems to solve to create and animate believable Virtual Humans.
Computer graphics has gone a long way from the early days in the 50’s and 60’s. Today we have the web, and it’s all visual that is the fashion. What does an unsuspecting user of computers, who is not a specialist, actually experience? Where are we when we leave the 3D interactive shooting game world and we want to do some simple things?
(Eurographics Association, 2000) Hubbold, Roger J.
The growth of the Internet, and company intranets, fuelled by the promise of sophisticated on−line services, has raised expectations of rich collaborative virtual environments, in which humans can indulge in cooperative problem solving. Pioneering demonstrations, such as the work of NASA on rehearsing maintenance tasks for the Hubble telescope, and recent moves into on−line multi−user gaming, have given us a glimpse of what may be possible in a restricted context. And yet, for most users the reality is somewhat different. Interaction in virtual environments is hard enough with only a single user. Add to this the problems of multiple users, collaborating over a network, and we still seem some way from having a really useful, or even usable, tool. The problems span technology (faster, lower latency networks will help, but will not, by themselves solve the problem), software architectures (just how do we ensure a coherent view of a shared environment for multiple users?), to psychology and human factors (we need experiments to quantify how well things work). Above all, how do we come up with solutions which not only work but are accessible to, and usable by, ordinary programmers and end−users? In this talk I will explore some of these problems and describe our own attempts at addressing them.