MPEG4 Player for HANIM 1.1 Compliant VRML Body

Christian Babski (Home Page)

HANIM 1.0/1.1 Standard Bodies - Facial Animation Page
Facial Animation Based on Displacer Prototype
Real-Time Deformation for HANIM 1.1
JAVA Librairies for HANIM 1.1 Bodies

Contents

  • Introduction : MPEG4 Package
  • Demo : MPEG4 Player

    Tested Browsers :
    WorldView 2.1
    CosmoPlayer 2.1

    • Introduction

    The player is realised in JAVA. It is based on a mpeg4 java package which is able to read a MPEG4 ascii bap file (Body Animation Parameters) from a local drive or from the web. The animation is converted to HANIM format (axis angle) ready to be applied to any HANIM 1.1 compatible body.
    The mpeg4 package is around 22Kb, the player (the interface and the applet) itself is 7Kb. The HANIM humanoid is controlled through the use of the EAIHuman package in order to be able to update humanoid joints with MPEG4 animation values. This a beta version in order to show that the connection MPEG4-HANIM 1.1 is working on the web !!

    MPEG4 Player Demo

    The interface is not hardly tested so don't be surprised if you get some exception messages in the Java console when trying to do something which is not planned (major remaining exceptions do not kill/freeze definitively the player). Testing interface is a little bite boring !!
    It is better to open the Java console before loading the web page. You will see the HANIM 1.1 body present in the scene parsed by the EAIHuman package. You open the interface by clicking on the only button that is present in the applet. You will see the mpeg4 player with a very classical interface. You can specify the source from where you want to get BAP files (press 'return' to validate it). The list of available files will appear in the list just below. Then by double-clicking on a BAP file in the list, the file will be loaded and converted. The animation becomes the current animation and can be played through the use of the interface (play, stop, pause, ff, fr... buttons). Available animations at the default URL were generated from our in-house animation format to BAP file format through the use of a tool written some times ago by Tolga Capin and Joaquim Esmeraldo. The body in the default scene can be replaced (manually) by any HANIM 1.1 compatible body (c.f. the output of the EAIHuman package if it does not work with a particular body and don't hesitate to send feedback). It is possible to visualise BAP file by browsing http://ligwww.epfl.ch/~babski/StandardBody/mpeg4/anim/.

    It was tested under IE4.0-5.0/WorldView 2.1 and Netscape 4.51/CosmoPlayer 2.1(.1)


    Click on the image to launch the demo.

    Computer Graphics Lab
    Swiss Federal Institute of Technology
    CH-1015 Lausanne
    SWITZERLAND

    E-mail : Christian.Babski@epfl.ch