Re: Of interest to the HM group.

[Rex Brooks <rexb@starbourne.com>]

Hi Andrew,

You are correct that HumanMarkup is more concerned with description 
than direction. We see our descriptive tags as being available to use 
with another middleware application that then drives either Talking 
Heads or Full Body 3D Humanoid Representations or Avatars. There are 
several of us who are veterans of VRML and X3D development in general 
and H-Anim in particular who have entered the HumanMarkup effort 
specifically for that purpose, myself among them.

What I think you might be well advised to do would be to monitor the 
MPEG4 effort because they have standardized a rather wide range of 
Facial Animation Protocols/Procedures which it would be good to have 
interoperate with your work and ours.

Ciao,
Rex

  At 6:45 AM +0000 9/7/01, raytrace@smtp.cs.curtin.edu.au wrote:
>Hi
>   >
>Joe Norris wrote:
>   >Much attention has been drawn to the myriad applications for HumanMar=
>   >kup and it's associated specifications and technologies. Considering =
>   >the nearly inexhaustible scope for HumanMarkup endeavors I would like=
>   >to propose that somehow within the OASIS TC process we develop a sub=
>   >committee/process/steering group/workflow management/etc that can ref=
>   >ine the process for determining research efforts for various HumanMar=
>   >kup applications.
>
>As a way of introduction to this list, I am currently researching an XML
>based language for directing a Virtual Human. I am a full partner in a
>European Union 5th Framework project called InterFace that is concerned
>with Human Computer Interface issues and one aspect of this is the
>production of computer generated Talking Heads. Our group has developed and
>implemented VHML - a Virtual Human Markup Language. This language marks up
>text that the Talking Head would read and adds tags such as <happy>,
><look_left> <smile> etc so that the voice and the head displays these
>emotions/gestures. You may find examples of audio produced this way as
>well as movies of the Talking Head at www.vhml.org
>The emotion and gesture tags are quite convincing.
>For those interested, we also have journal articles, conference papers and
>upcoming book chapters which talk about the language.
>
>An initial draft of the VHML document can also be found at that site
>although this is really an in-house version which is currently undergoing
>modification for verification/validation of the language. It uses the W3C
>format and has added to the W3C document describing the Speech Synthesis
>Markup Languauge (i.e it blatantly uses that document since the Text to
>Speech sub-language of VHML uses SSML). The next version of the document
>should be available before the Sept 17th meeting.
>
>I have monitored this list for a while and I am not certain if what we do
>is appropriate to what you talk about but we are committed to evolving our
>language to cater for the types of things that a Human would be able to
>do. The HM group seems to be more interested in descriptive rather than
>directive markup but the two do come from the same basic knowledge.
>
>I am happy to provide my expertise in this very practical area of
>Human Markup for any Technical Committee. If the powers that be are
>interested in what we do and what we have learnt and can use that
>expertise, then please contact me and I will be happy to assist.
>
>My next 5th Framework meeting in Europe is at the end of September and I
>intend to report on what the Human Markup group is doing and how we can
>fit in with their efforts.
>
>Thanks for your time.
>
>  	Andrew Marriott.
>  	Senior Lecturer.
>
> 
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-- 
Rex Brooks
GeoAddress: 1361-A Addison, Berkeley, CA, 94702 USA, Earth
W3Address: http://www.starbourne.com
Email: rexb@starbourne.com
Tel: 510-849-2309
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