Interactive Lecture using Cyber Assistant Professor: CAP

The 3D computer graphics (3D-CG) animation using a virtual actor´s speaking is very effective as an educational medium. But it takes a long time to produce a 3D-CG animation. To reduce the cost of producing 3D-CG educational contents and improve the capability of the education system, we have developed a new education system using Virtual Actor. It includes 3D-CG stage, many kinds of stage parts (3D-CG shaped models, photographs or text panels) and Virtual Actor(s). Virtual Actor is a software robot of various shaped based on 3D-CG and speech synthesis. Virtual Actor speaks English/Japanese by voice synthesizer with facial expressions and body actions. We have developed an education system named Cyber Assistant Professor (CAP). CAP has been designed for an e-learning system, which enables interactive communication between virtual teacher and learner. We also have developed the exclusive scenario language to write a scenario of 3D-CG animation. It is a tag-based hypertext language like HTML. CAP converts this scenario to real-time interactive 3D-CG animations, which are not rendering movies. This paper describes the system architecture of CAP, details of scenario language and results of experimental lessons named interactive lecture in an elementary school