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We present an extension of the Virtual Human Toolkit to include a range of computing platforms, including mobile, web, Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR). The Toolkit uses a mix of in-house and commodity technologies to support audio-visual sensing, speech recognition, natural language processing, nonverbal behavior generation and realization, text-to-speech generation and rendering. It has been extended to support computing platforms beyond Windows by leveraging microservices. The resulting framework maintains the modularity of the underlying architecture, allows re-use of both logic and content through cloud services, and is extensible by porting lightweight clients. We present the current state of the framework, discuss how we model and animate our characters, and offer lessons learned through several use cases, including expressive character animation in seated VR, shared space and navigation in room-scale VR, autonomous AI in mobile AR, and real-time user performance feedback leveraging mobile sensors in headset AR.

The paper presents a design and its implementation on a physically based animation of a lovely squirrel mascot playing Chinese Tai Chi. The work result was from a project aiming at an application of motion tracking technology to generate physically based animation for the Macao 2005 East Asian Games, in which the mascot called Pak Pak will play Tai Chi inside a virtually constructed Macao Sports Dome. This paper describes the modeling of the virtual character Pak Pak as well as some issues in applying the motion data captured to animate the character. Some solutions on modeling the complex part of squirrel shape and on the solution of fitness problem of human data applied to squirrel character are also proposed. We will go through both the ideas and technical detail on the solutions. A complete animation on the fly-over of the sports dome as well as the lovely Pak Pak playing Chinese Tai Chi will be presented along with the paper presentation.