Adding support for high-level skeletal animation

We present a data structure specially geared toward the definition and management of synthetic actors in real-time computer graphics. The relation between our proposed data structure and the Silicon Graphics API Performer/spl reg/ makes its implementation possible on a low-cost real-time platform thanks to current accelerating cards. We demonstrate how our data structure is used to generate motion by means of two different applications. Both of them make use of direct and inverse kinematics and may use motion capture. ARTgraph is a development environment devoted to the creation of high-quality real-time 3D-graphics applications (basically, 3D games) and the ALVW system is a general platform that provides and coordinates a sensing-analysis-acting loop to provide behavior for synthetic actors in their own scenario. The aim of this paper is to contribute to the standardization process of multiplatform synthetic actor programs or libraries.