Presenting in Virtual Worlds: An Architecture for a 3D Anthropomorphic Presenter

Meeting and lecture room technology is a burgeoning field. Such technology can provide real-time support for physically present participants, for online remote participation, or for offline access to meetings or lectures. Capturing relevant information from meetings or lectures is necessary to provide this kind of support. Multimedia presentation of this captured information requires a lot of attention. In this article, we focus on models and associated algorithms that steer the virtual presenter´s presentation animations. In our approach, we generate the presentations from a script describing the synchronization of speech, gestures, and movements. The script has also a channel devoted to presentation sheets (slides) and sheet changes, which we assume are an essential part of the presentation. To present and explain information, this 3D humanoid presenter uses output channels such as speech and animation of posture, painting, and involuntary movements