Virtual characters facial and body animation through the edition and interpretation of mark-up languages

The virtual characters are starting to be widely used in user interfaces in order to improve the human-computer communication. However, the design of avatar animation is still largely restricted to specialized users, revealing a current lack of intuitive and easy-to-use editing tools. In this paper, we propose to develop a graphic editor based on mark-up language. After analyzing the main existing mark-up languages, we decided to follow the specifications of the virtual human mark-up language (VHML). In this paper, we present the development of the graphic editor based on this mark-up language and its interpreter for generating the real-time avatar animation.