Gesture Recognition in Flow in the Context of Virtual Theater

Our aim is to put on a short play featuring a real actor and a virtual actor, who will communicate through movements and choreography with mutual synchronization. Although the theatrical context is a good ground for multimodal communication between human and virtual actors, this paper will mainly deal with the ability to perceive the gestures of a real actor. During the performance, our goal is to match real-time observation with recorded examples. The recognition event will be sent to a virtual actor which reply with its own movements. We follow an approach similar to that proposed by [1] or [2]. They made the assumption that the first phase is to summarize the variation of the movement into a symbolic description. Then, the recognition phase is performed when a new trajectory is consistent with this description. The main section will describe our method of creating a signature from gestural data and the recognition system in real-time flow. To conclude, we shall present some results.