Betty: Planning and Generating Animations for the Visualization of Movements and Spatial Relations

Autor: Andreas Butz

Herausgeber:

In the field of multimodal presentation of information on a computer screen normally the modes Text and (statical) Graphics are used [Feiner'89, Wahlster'90 + '93]. But especially the computer screen yields the possibility to present informations in the form of animated graphics, i.e. animations. [Badler'90, Karp'90]. One advantage of animations is, that the dimension Time (succession, duration) can immediately be expressed. Another advantage is, that in an animation it is much easier to (virtually) cross the border to the third spatial dimension than it is in statical graphics. The problem of synthesizing an animation was regarded in this work as a planning problem and the result is an animation planner that, starting from an visualization goal, plans the whole script for an animation including all low-level camera and object motions. The system takes all decisions about camera positions, zooms, moves and cuts considering the actual context as well as some fundamental filmmaking rules [Karp'90]. The script is then realized by a given animation system which computes the single frames and does the playback. BETTY is part of the multimodal user interface WIP (Knowledge-based Presentation of Information, [Wahlster'93]), that generates instructions for technical devices. At the moment BETTY is able to compute animations to demonstrate movements, to localize parts of a device and to explode constructive groups.