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Avafresh

This document discusses avatar technology, beginning with definitions of avatars as representations of users in virtual environments. It describes categories of avatars like animal, cartoon, and celebrity avatars. The document outlines several avatar implementation techniques used in the Multimedia Virtual Laboratory project, including plane, depth, voxel, and face models. Current and potential applications of avatar technology are presented, along with considerations around its development and use.

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Chiru Yadav
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74 views27 pages

Avafresh

This document discusses avatar technology, beginning with definitions of avatars as representations of users in virtual environments. It describes categories of avatars like animal, cartoon, and celebrity avatars. The document outlines several avatar implementation techniques used in the Multimedia Virtual Laboratory project, including plane, depth, voxel, and face models. Current and potential applications of avatar technology are presented, along with considerations around its development and use.

Uploaded by

Chiru Yadav
Copyright
© Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PPT, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Avatar Technology

Swami Ramananda Tirtha Institute of Science & Technology

Seminar on
AVATAR TECHNOLOGY

Presented by
CH.SIVA CHAITANYA 08141A0503

Definitions
Originally the term avatar came from Hindu mythology.
Representation of the realistic human image has been required in the virtual reality applications due to the improvement of the high presence virtual reality display systems

Definitions
Simply put, an avatar is You, or at least a facsimile of you. It is a graphical image of a user, representing yourself or someone else on a computer screen. Think of an avatar as your alter ego in the virtual world of cyberspace. It is your body in Cyberspace, your presence in the virtual communities growing inside two and three dimensional virtual worlds online.

Definitions
Another kind of avatar is sometimes called an agent, a character, or a bot. This is a graphical personification of a computer or a process that is running on a computer. Avatars, or virtual representations of living creatures, and their networked environments, represent the next major wave in online communications.

Categories
Simpler approach to categorizing avatars would be to group them according to more general visual types like animal avatar, cartoon avatar, celebrity avatar, real face avatar, evil avatars. Animal avatars
Animal avatars can represent a person's pet or emphasize traits normally associated with an animal

Cartoon avatars

Celebrity avatars

Evil avatars

The Technological Reality


Avatar technology can offer its share of technological benefits. For example, it is less bandwidth-intensive than regular Internet applications. However, there are some technology issues that must be addressed if avatars are to become commonplace.

Implementation of the video avatar


various kinds of video avatar techniques that integrate the persons live video image into the virtual world were developed In order to use the effective video avatar methods in the virtual reality applications, it is desirable to choose the suitable geometric model and the suitable capture method according to the purpose and the system environment. The various video avatar techniques are implemented in MVL

MVL (Multimedia Virtual Laboratory)


Multimedia virtual Laboratory is a distributed virtual environment in which remote researchers can communicate mutually sharing research resources though the broadband network. In order to realize this concept, immersive projection displays CABIN at the University of Tokyo and COSMOS at the Gifu Techno plaza were connected through the Japan Gigabit Network.

the MVL aims at realizing high presence collaborative work among remote people sharing some information In this example, the computer scientist, the experimental engineer and the designer are jointly working in the shared virtual world to develop an airplane.

In this method, the user's image is captured by a video camera placed within the immersive projection display, and a video avatar is created. This video avatar is sent to the other site and superimposed on the virtual world. By transmitting the video avatars mutually, remote users can communicate face to face in the shared virtual world.
Immersive Projection displays
Video avatar of user A Video avatar of user B

Immersive Projection displays

Video image

Shared virtual world

User A

User B

Video avatar
In the MVL project, the video avatar technology that utilized the live video image of the user in the shared virtual world was developed In this process, a user's image is first captured by the video camera, and only the users figure is segmented from the background as well as the geometric model of the user is created from the captured image

Some of the geometric models are


Panel model Depth model Voxel model Face model

Plane model video avatar used for the navigation


The simplest geometric model that can be used to generate a video avatar is a two dimensional panel this method integrates the video image as a rectangular billboard into the virtual world, it cannot express the three-dimensional persons gesture.

Depth model video avatar used for the scientific visualization


In this method, the distance value for each pixel is calculated by computing the gaps between the corresponding points in the stereo images captured by the stereo camera.

Voxel model video avatar used for the psychological experiment


In order to compensate the imperfection of the 2.5-dimensional video avatar, it is necessary to generate a complete three-dimensional model from the captured video images

Face model video avatar used in the conference room


In this study, the accurate face model was created beforehand in the offline process, and the video images captured from two directions were texture mapped on it in real-time while tracking the persons head movement using the OPTOTRAK sensor of the Northern Digital Inc

Current Projects
Xerox Palo Alto Research Center: The Office Avatars Project The goal of the Office Avatars project is to investigate the use of autonomous avatars in the workplace. In particular, it is interested in the role of an avatar as a personal representative which can provide useful information or other utility when the avatar's owner cannot be present.

Current Projects
Schlumberger's advanced technical group asked Planet 9 to prototype an AI guide front end to their Intranet search engine. To date, the project has received ten million dollars in internal funding.

Current Projects
Damer's company is working with a health insurance company in Europe. They want to have a virtual community for their customer base where people can come to their headquarters. Damer says that,"They represent a brand new meeting of human communications. The virtual worlds are worlds where people come to socialize, where people come to build cities, work, and try utopian experiences; to build together and learn together."

What Can it do for us?


Avatar technology is much better than Video Conferencing It works well with Intranets that do not support Video Conferencing traffic VRML avatars work with existing systems quite nicely Avatars can prevent information bottlenecks due to personality clashes

What Can it do for us?


Avatars can express emotion through facial expressions and body posture, and can point at artifacts being discussed. In other words, people can bring their stuff, like files, to an avatar meeting. Avatars can act as personal representatives to maintain a sense of presence and cohesiveness within workgroups when members are absent. Avatars are excellent for online education.

Considerations and Clarifications


Avatar technology is a fairly new horizon and there is little consensus on what it will mean for society in the 21st century. There is the added problem of very little information being accessible to those who want to learn more about the technology. And problems with terminology.

QUERIES ???

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