Realistic behavior of control actuators is important for virtual proto-typing applications. We present a systematic approach for modeling such articulated components as described in the European Standard EN 894-3. Control actuators may have several rotational and translational degrees of freedom (DOFs), possibly with discrete lock states. During user interactions, information about the actuators' manipulation is collected and made available to the higher application layers in the form of interaction events. This allows for recording and playback of demonstrated manipulation sequences for many purposes, such as ergonomics evaluations involving virtual humans. The framework uses XML for declaration and is implemented using a freely available physics engine.

Abstract We propose a novel data‐driven animation method for the synthesis of natural looking human grasping. Motion data captured from human grasp actions is used to train a probabilistic model of the human grasp space. This model greatly reduces the high number of degrees of freedom of the human hand to a few dimensions in a continuous grasp space. The low dimensionality of the grasp space in turn allows for efficient optimization when synthesizing grasps for arbitrary objects. The method requires only a short training phase with no need for preprocessing of graphical objects for which grasps are to be synthesized. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

The development of complex object behaviour in domains of interactive graphical applications such as desktop-virtual reality (desktop-VR) or multimedia is still a problem today. We attribute this situation to the lack of sophisticated concepts and tools for pre-implementation behaviour specification and provide the tool-supported visual modeling language SSIML/Behaviour to address this problem. As an extension of the Unified Modeling Language (UML) our language allows the platform-independent behaviour description and can be easily integrated into UML tools. Moreover, it is possible to map SSIML/Behaviour models to platform-specific program code automatically.