An easy-to-use authoring tool to create attractive animation for embodied agents and its applications to education

Targeted at non-professional content creators, this paper presents an easy-to-use tool to create attractive animation for embodied agents just the same as professional directors. Unlike conventional methods that must manually synchronize gestures with speech in many key frames and design many facial textures for expression, our novel authoring system allows the user to semi-automatically create animation in only about 10% of the time required for manual animation. In our authoring tool, when the user inserts a gesture from the motion database into a specific speech segment, the synchronized gesture is generated in terms of both duration and timing. In addition, when the user selects a point on the circumplex model of affect, a facial expression with emotion is generated based on the Facial Action Coding System (FACS) technique (Ekmanet al., 1978). Furthermore, through applications to education, we show that an agent with highlighted gestures or intense expressions created by our authoring tool is more effective than video lectures for improving student comprehension and motivation.