| The emergence of virtual reality applications and human-like interfaces has given rise to the necessity of producing realistic models of the human body. Building and animating a synthetic, cartoon-like, model of the human body has been practiced for many years in the gaming industry and advances in the game platforms have led to more realistic models, although still cartoon-like. The issue of building a virtual human clone is still a matter of ongoing research and relies on effective algorithms which will determine the 3D structure of an actual human being and duplicate this with a three-dimensional graphical model, fully textured, by correct mapping of 2D images of the human on the 3D model.
Realistic human animation is also a matter of ongoing research and, in the case of human cloning, relies on accurate tracking of the 3D motion of a human, which has to be duplicated by his 3D model. The inherently complex articulation of the human body imposes great difficulties in both the tracking and animation processes, which are being tackled by specific techniques, such as modeling languages, as well as by standards developed for these purposes. Particularly the human face and hands present the greatest difficulties in modeling and animation due to their complex articulation and communicative importance in expressing the human language and emotions.
Within the context of this book, we present the state-of-the-art methods for analyzing the structure and motion of the human body in parallel with the most effective techniques for constructing realistic synthetic models of virtual humans. |