High-quality, interactive, three-dimensional character animation for the Internet

The storytelling delivery mechanism of the future is certainly the Internet, due to its interactive and interconnectivity capability. However, Internet bandwidth is the single most constrictive aspect of real-time, high-quality, interactive character animation. The goal of this research is to make the smallest amount of data represents the largest spectrum of character definition and movement. We suggest that surfaces must be exact (verses polygonal approximations), movement must be abstracted (rather than geometry-specific), and computational power should be balanced against bandwidth, (i.e. computationally expensive compression and decompression should occur on the ends of the Internet pipeline to reduce traffic).