Avatars in virtual worlds provide a richer way than email or chat to communicate online, but despite better graphics and sound quality, they still can’t rival in-person meetings. Now new software may help virtual characters appear more lifelike by imbuing them with realistic body language.
Rather than assign physical gestures based on the literal meaning of a person’s spoken words, the program focuses on prosody, the combination of vocal rhythm, intonation and stress. To assemble a library of gestures associated with prosody features, Sergey Levine and Vladlen Koltun at Stanford University, California, used a motion-capture studio…
