Soul Machines Limited

Xueyuan Zhang

Mark Andrew Sagar

Tim Szu-Hsien Wu

Xiani Tan

Mark Sagar

Jo Hutton

Utkarsh Saxena

Amy Wang

Paige Skinner

Hazel Watson-Smith

Hannah Clark-Younger

Emma Perry

Shane Blakett

Travers Biddle

Kirstin Marcon

Teah Rota

Embodiments described herein relate to the autonomous animation of Gestures by the automatic application of animations to Input Text—or the automatic application of animation Mark-up wherein the Mark-up triggers nonverbal communication expressions or Gestures. In order for an Embodied Agent's movements to come across as natural and human-like as possible, a Text-To-Gesture Algorithm (TTG Algorithm) analyses Input Text of a Communicative Utterance before it is uttered by a Embodied Agent, and marks it up with appropriate and meaningful Gestures given the meaning, context, and emotional content of Input Text and the gesturing style or personality of the Embodied Agent.

Autonomous animation in embodied agents

To realistically animate a String (such as a sentence) a hierarchical search algorithm is provided to search for stored examples (Animation Snippets) of sub-strings of the String, in decreasing order of sub-string length, and concatenate retrieved sub-strings to complete the String of speech animation. In one embodiment, real-time generation of speech animation uses model visemes to predict the animation sequences at onsets of visemes and a look-up table based (data-driven) algorithm to predict the dynamics at transitions of visemes. Specifically posed Model Visemes may be blended with speech animation generated using another method at corresponding time points in the animation when the visemes are to be expressed. An Output Weighting Function is used to map Speech input and Expression input into Muscle-Based Descriptor weightings.

Real-time generation of speech animation

Growing community of inventors

Auckland, New Zealand

Xueyuan Zhang