CONTROLLING VIRTUAL HUMANS USING PDAS MARIO GUTIERREZ, FREDERIC VEXO AND DANIEL THALMANN, Virtual Reality Lab (VRlab), EPFL 1015 Lausanne, Switzerland E-mail: {mario.gutierrez, frederic.vexo, daniel.thalmann}@epfl.ch The new breed of Personal Digital Assistants (PDA) and mobile phones have enough computing power to display 3D graphics. These new mobile devices (handhelds) have some other interesting communication and interaction possibilities as well. In this paper we explore the potential applications of 3D virtual humans inside mobile devices and the use of such handhelds as control interfaces to drive the virtual humans and navigate through their virtual environments. 1 Introduction Since its introduction in 1984 by PSION, the concept of Personal Digital Assistant has remained as an idea with great potential in the computing devices industry. Although the beginning was uncertain, as it is with the majority of innovative technologies, now-a-days the mobile devices are a reality. The path to the success of this idea has passed by several technical and conceptual obstacles. The most important difficulties to overcome have been the hardware performance, the creation of dedicated content and the user interface. The first problem has been solved thanks to the exponential improvements on the microprocessors and integrated circuits technologies. The last generation of PDA devices has a microprocessor with a RISC-like architecture and the computing power equivalent to that of a 10 years old workstation. This powerful CPU allows handling a 16-bit color display as well as different "peripheric" equipments such as a video camera, an integrated stereo sound system with recording capabilities, wireless network cards, etc. Having a fully functional high performance computer system which fits in the palm of your hand is a reality. However, the second problem could be solved by special extra work on existing content, in order to consider the resolution problem and the size of the screen, or by providing special content. brought to you by CORE View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk provided by Infoscience - École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne