Construction of Symbolic Representation from Human Motion Information

In general, avatar-based communication has a merit that it can represent non-verbal information. The simplest way of representing the non-verbal information is to capture the human action/motion by a motion capture system and to visualize the received motion data through the avatar. However, transferring raw motion data often makes the avatar motion unnatural or unrealistic because the body structure of the avatar is usually a bit different from that of the human beings. We think this can be solved by transferring the meaning of motion, instead of the raw motion data, and by properly visualizing the meaning depending on characteristics of the avatar’s function and body structure. Here, the key issue is how to symbolize the motion meanings. Particularly, the problem is what kind of motions we should symbolize. In this paper, we introduce an algorithm to decide the symbols to be recognized referring to accumulated communication data, i.e., motion data.