The last few years have seen great maturationin the computation speed and control methods needed to portray 3D virtualhumanssuitableforreal interactiveapplications. We first describe the state of the art, then focus on the particular approach taken at the University of Pennsylvania with the Jack system. Various aspects of real-time virtual humans are considered, such as appearance and motion, interactive control, autonomous action, gesture, attention, locomotion, and multiple individuals. The underlying architecture consists of a sense-control-act structure that permits reactive behaviors to be locally adaptive to the environment, and a PaT-Net parallel finite-state machine controller that can be used to drive virtual humans through complex tasks. We then argue for a deep connection between language and animationand describe current efforts in linking them through twosystems: the Jack Presenter andthe JackMOO extension to lambdaMOO. Finally, we outline a Parameterized Action Represe...
Norman I. Badler