Real-time avatar animation steered by live body motion

The future customer service provided by call centres will be changed due to new web-based interactive multimedia technologies. Technical support will be offered in a completely new way by using advanced image processing technologies and natural representation of virtual humans. We present a prototype system of an animated avatar, which is steered by live body motion of the operator in a call centre. The hand and head motion is transferred directly to the avatar at the customer side in order to support a more natural representation of the virtual human. The system tracks the operators hands and the head motion quite robust in real-time without specific initialization based on a monocular camera.