Piavca

PIAVCA is the Platform Independent API for Virtual Characters and Avatars. The project aims to produce a unified character animation system that is usable across multiple platforms and that can be used as a basis for virtual character and animation research across a number of domains. Piavca is implemented using the Cal3d animation library and is able to integrate smoothly with a number of different graphics architectures. The major focus of PIAVCA is body animation, particularly based on motion capture data or hand animated motion data. PIAVCA contains a number of features that help with the manipulation of motion data. The most important being a single abstraction for all sources of motion data, whether they are data loaded from file, real time streams such as tracking data, procedural animation or manipulations of existing data. This allows for very flexible motion manipulation systems. PIAVCA has been released as open source software under the Mozilla Public licence at which point we will be keen to encourage academics researching virtual characters to use it.