Web-Based Handwriting Education with Animated Virtual Teacher

This article introduces our Web-based handwriting education system developed with 3D computer graphics and pen computing technologies. Traditionally, in teaching handwriting, the teacher writes a character on the blackboard, and then students try to follow the teacher in order to write the same character. The teacher can check whether a student’s handwriting is spatially correct by looking at its shape, but the teacher is not able to verify if the student is writing in the correct stroke order with the correct number of strokes. As a result, we design a Web-based handwriting education system. With our proposed system, students can stay at home to do the exercises for learning the handwriting of characters. A student’s handwriting can be captured in digital format with the information in both temporal and spatial domain, and the results can be sent to the teacher for evaluation. In addition, we propose to animate a virtual teacher on the student’s terminal for demonstrating the handwriting of the characters to give students a sense of presence.