Two Approaches to Scripting Character Animation

Lifelike animated agents present a challenging ongoing agenda for research. Such agent metaphors will only be widely applicable to on-line applications when there is a standardised way to map underlying engines with the visual presentation of the agents. This paper delineates functions and specifications of two mark-up languages for scripting the animation of virtual characters. These languages are: Character Mark-up Language (CML) which is an XML-based embodied agent character attribute definition and animation scripting language designed to aid in the rapid incorporation of lifelike agents into online applications or virtual reality worlds. CML is constructed based jointly on motion and multi-modal capabilities of virtual human figures. The other is Avatar Mark-up Language (AML) which is also an XML-based multimodal scripting language designed to be easily understandable by human animators and easily generated by a software process such as an agent. We illustrate the constructs of the language and describe real-time execution architectures for using these languages in online applications.