RAAT - The reverie avatar authoring tool

Avatar embodiment within the World Wide Web has gained a lot of popularity in recent years thanks to the introduction of networked virtual environments created for socialization and entertainment purposes. As each of these virtual worlds generates a unique set of user requirements concerning representation preferences based on the environment´s context, it becomes clear that every attempt at creating such virtual worlds should encourage the development of the appropriate avatar authoring tools, being based on a thorough study of avatar desirable features. The Reverie Avatar Authoring Tool (RAAT) introduced in this paper helps developers address these ever-emerging avatar feature requirements, allowing them to easily set up and design online character creation applications, tailored to the virtual environment specifications. Summarizing the design process to a simple task of documenting the application interface within a single script, RAAT encapsulates the demanding tasks of character creation within simple function calls, while also offering a web-based real-time solution for photorealistic integration of user physical appearance onto the character mesh.