Anymation with CATHI

This paper presents an incremental approach to the automated generation of D animation clips for the explanation of technical devices It de scribes the system Cathi which is part of the intelligent multimedia presentation system PPP Cathi generates animation clips in the context of a coordinated multimedia document The system is able to generate animation scripts and to present the corresponding animations with a minimal delay i e within a few seconds This allows it to be used for on line and on demand generation of presentations The structure of the generated animation de pends not only on the given communicative con tent It is also in uenced by a number of genera tion parameters Furthermore the design of the nal animation depends on resource limitations such as the available computing capacity and the graphical capacity of the output medium The more powerful the machine is the more com plex the animation scripts generated by Cathi tend to be but a uent output within a given amount of time is achieved on nearly any ma chine hence the name anymation