Combining computer animation and speech understanding to a multimedia system

The objectives of the multimedia project currently running at Siemens Corporate R&D laboratories are outlined. The long-term goal is to develop a computer animation system with a speech dialog interface allowing cooperative work in a broadband-network environment. The authors outline experience with the production of animation by current tools. Based on that experience, research was done on the extension of animation tools by physically based models and on the improvement of the user interface by providing a command-word recognizer, leading to a first prototype. The authors consider the implications of the use of multimedia in broadband-networking and discuss their vision of a future interactive animation system