BETTY: planning and generating animations for the visualization of movements and spatial relations

In this work the problem of synthesizing an animation is regarded as a planning problem, and the result is an animation planner that, starting from a visualization goal, plans a script for an animation including all low-level camera and object motions. The system takes all decisions about camera positions, zooms, moves and cuts considering the actual context as well as some fundamental filmmaking rules. The script is then realized by a given animation system which computes the single frames and does the playback. BETTY is part of the multimodal user interface WIP, that investigates the plan-based automatic generation of multimodal operation instructions for technical devices. Presently, BETTY is able to compute animations to demonstrate movements, to localize parts of a device and to explode assemblies.