A dead-reckoning algorithm for virtual human figures

In networked virtual environments; when the participants are represented by virtual human figures, the articulated structure of the human body introduces a new complexity in the usage of the network resources; because the size of a message needed to represent the body posture is much larger than the one needed for simple, non-articulated objects. This might create a significant overhead in communication, especially as the number of participants in the simulation increases. In addition, the animation should be realistic, as it is easy to recognize anomalies in the virtual human animation. This requires real-time algorithms to decrease the network overhead, while considering body characteristics. The dead-reckoning technique is a way to decrease the number of messages communicated among the participants, and has been used for simple non-articulated objects in popular systems. In this paper, we present the deadreckoning approach for articulated virtual human figures, and discuss main issues and experimental results.