Semantic framework for interactive animation generation

As a key technology, interactive animation has been widely used in Virtual Reality nowadays which is important for the success of various VR applications. However, despite many years history and the ability to produce stunning illusory and immersive effects for many VR applications, interactive animation generation remains one of the most labour-intensive ones. As a tedious task, its generation requires a complicated systematic procedure. Its inherent functional features involve a lot of complex technical problems: various aspects of requirements have to be handled, from the HCI technologies to the efficient management of animation data assets. With the continual evolvement of the complexity of current interactive VR technologies and animation practices, systematic and standardised description is imperative to provide a clear understanding of this production process. In this paper, a semantic framework is constructed at an abstract and semantic level using ontological methods for modelling the construction of interactive animation generation. To facilitate the process of interactive animation generation and improve its reusability and modularity, domain-specific ontologies based on the semantic framework are defined by formalising the multimodal interaction method and the construction of the animation data assets repository at the ontological implementation level. Finally, hand-gesture-based interactive animation is generated in the context of traditional Chinese shadow play, which involves novel functional features like hand-gesture-based interactive control and ontology-based intelligent animation assets management.