Design and evaluation of a sketch-based gesture animation tool

Hand gestures are one of the most important components of nonverbal communication, conveying both affective and pragmatic information. They involve the path the hand takes through space, the orientation of the hand and the shape of the hand over time, the latter defined by the angles of the finger joints. Being able to rapidly produce gesture animation is important for two distinct tasks. First, it is important for authoring animations when characters are in conversation, a very common task. Second, there is a growing set of animation tools that are designed to create motion for characters that can gesture autonomously in interactive settings and games [Thiebaux et al. 2008; Heloir and Kipp 2009; van Welbergen et al. 2010; Neff et al. 2008]. These tools generally rely on libraries of gesture animations and it is important to be able to generate large numbers of such animations quickly and at low cost in order to build libraries for particular characters and tasks. This paper presents a tool designed to achieve both goals.