Interactive animation of personalized human locomotion

This paper describes recent advances in the procedural animation of human locomotion. Our original KLA W (Key frame-Less Animation of Walking) system [3] has been substantially modified; locomotion parameters such as "velocity" or "step length" as well as locomotion attributes like "bounciness" or "pelvic list" can now be changed on the fly, and since they become immediately active, their effect can be observed in the motion of a human figure on the screen. By providing interactive and real-time control, the system has been shown to be quite useful in the rapid prototyping of personalized human locomotion. Sequences like a the walk of an old man or a marching soldier can be quite readily obtained by changing the values for parameters and attributes via sliders. Whereas the original system relied on a simple dynamic model to produce realistic locomotion cycles, our new version is completely kinematic. Cubic spline and linear interpolation between step constraints replaces the dynamic calculations with little trade-off in realism, but a great improvement in performance.