We present the technical specification for an avatar that is compliant with Animgen, the synthetic signing engine used at the University of East Anglia for generating deaf signing animations. The specification will include both the basic definition required for any standard animating avatar, and the additional parameters that Animgen requires to generate signing. Avatars compatible with Animgen are created using the ARPToolkit, an application developed at UEA that has a plug-in architecture for tools that are used for rigging an avatar mesh for animation. The toolkit also generates the additional data needed by Animgen for each avatar.
@inproceedings{jennings:10011:sign-lang:lrec,
author = {Jennings, Vince and Elliott, Ralph and Kennaway, Richard and Glauert, John},
title = {Requirements for a Signing Avatar},
pages = {133--136},
editor = {Dreuw, Philippe and Efthimiou, Eleni and Hanke, Thomas and Johnston, Trevor and Mart{\'i}nez Ruiz, Gregorio and Schembri, Adam},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the {LREC2010} 4th Workshop on the Representation and Processing of Sign Languages: Corpora and Sign Language Technologies},
maintitle = {7th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation ({LREC} 2010)},
publisher = {{European Language Resources Association (ELRA)}},
address = {Valletta, Malta},
day = {22--23},
month = may,
year = {2010},
language = {english},
url = {https://www.sign-lang.uni-hamburg.de/lrec/pub/10011.pdf}
}