Behind the scenes, work has been going on to standardise humanoids in digital applications. And now the previously separate work of VRML and MPEG-4 might be coming together, under the acronym h-anim.

The VRML Humanoid Animation Working Group (h-anim) came to life at the VRML '97 Conference in February 1997. The MPEG-4 SNHC (Synthetic Natural Hybrid Coding) team have been working hard on standardising the transmission of humanoid representations an d movements.

On the 16-19 February at VRML '98, the two working groups met together. It looks as though a common h-anim representation of the body will be adopted for the VRML and MPEG-4 arenas. This makes complete sense. After all, humans are 'one-design', so h aving two incompatible digital representations of bone and joint structures would have been a nonsense.

The h-anim working group's website can be accessed through www.vrml.org. The latest draft h-anim format is there, together with a record of all the e-mails on the list and links to MPEG-4 and other activities. Best of all there are demos of what can be done with h-anim under a standard VRML 2.0 browser. h-anim has completed the basic work on the humanoid body and its animation. Now its attention is turning to facial animation and clothing. If you would like to be involved just join the h-anim list. You can also keep in touch with the convergence of humanoid standardisation - perhaps one of the most fundamental standardisation activities ever!

Meanwhile, the POPULATE project is busy working on getting its first AvatarBooth ready by Christmas. We hope that you will be able to enter the booth and have an h-anim avatar of yourself automatically generated.

Avatars of people will be made available in h-anim format for use in other i3 project demonstrators as well as in other 3D applications.

Stephen, who works in the POPULATE consortium, is a founder member of h-anim.

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