RAAT - The reverie avatar authoring tool

Abstract

Avatar embodiment within the World Wide Web has gained a lot of popularity in recent years thanks to the introduction of networked virtual environments created for socialization and entertainment purposes. As each of these virtual worlds generates a unique set of user requirements concerning representation preferences based on the environment's context, it becomes clear that every attempt at creating such virtual worlds should encourage the development of the appropriate avatar authoring tools, being based on a thorough study of avatar desirable features. The Reverie Avatar Authoring Tool (RAAT) introduced in this paper helps developers address these ever-emerging avatar feature requirements, allowing them to easily set up and design online character creation applications, tailored to the virtual environment specifications. Summarizing the design process to a simple task of documenting the application interface within a single script, RAAT encapsulates the demanding tasks of character creation within simple function calls, while also offering a web-based real-time solution for photorealistic integration of user physical appearance onto the character mesh.