The ICEA plug-in for virtual reality, immersive creation and edition of animation

Abstract

This paper reports on ICEA, the Immersive Creation and Edition of Animation platform we developed in order to support easy computer animations. This plug-in allows users to create new animations and to modify existing ones by interacting intuitively within Virtual Environments. The aim of our system is to enable people without computer animation background to design objects' motions and animations through simplified and immersive recording, editing and modification processes. Indeed, ICEA uses the immersive authoring principles, and as such, it offers an alternative to classic 3D animation solutions: users have only to perform actions in the virtual environment using any available interfaces to create animations. ICEA's core is coded in Haskell on top of the FRVR framework. It builds on a functional reactive paradigm, thus allowing easy scaling of the plug-in usage. ICEA is a fully C++ compatible plug-in supporting most Virtual Reality applications. To validate the concept ICEA, we implemented and tested it on a “sale's man-like” problem: users were asked to generate (e.g. create, play, and edit) the movement of a character on what they considered the shortest path linking predetermined points. Our preliminary results show that users familiarize quickly with immersive paths manipulation.