An open architecture for comic actor animation

The multimedia rapture has held out hopes for advancements in user-centric computing. At the same time, however, there is a move towards autonomous software (cf. intelligent filters, mobile and distributed agents, etc.), leaving users with an uncomfortable lack of knowledge about and control over ?what these components are doing behind their backs?. Visualization of both autonomous agent action and user-agent interaction becomes a crucial issue if these conflicting trends are to be harmonized. We present a system service for comic actor animation, which can be used as a representation of agents of all kinds. A second use case is for rapid authoring of animations which augment multimedia presentations or off-the-shelf software. Our focus is on the reuse of the necessary artwork, using a modular and flexible building-block approach. As a preliminary step, this approach requires a set of elementary animation sequences to be created by a professional graphic artist,once per character. These sequences can be repeatedly combined in custom animated cartoons by easy-to-use commands at runtime. Our Comic Actor Editor Engine CAeditEngine uses a sophisticated approach for combining the elementary building blocks to form complete animations. Our Comic Actor Playing Engine CAplayEngine uses a digital chroma keying technique in combination with layering to display the animations on top of any graphical user interface and any interactive software. The system runs under MS Windows NT, a first version was used in a public interactive exhibit of multimedia and animation techniques and showed excellent performance.