A mobile environment for sketching-based skeleton generation Qingzheng Zheng & Frederick W. B. Li Received: 8 September 2010 / Revised: 25 October 2010 Accepted: 23 November 2010 / Published online: 14 December 2010 # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2010 Abstract Articulated character animation is typically performed by manually creating and rigging a skeleton into an unfolded 3D object. However, such tasks are not trivial, as they require a substantial amount of training and practices. Although automatic skeleton extraction methods have been proposed, they generally may not guarantee that the resulting skeleton can help produce desired animations according to user intention. In this paper, we present a sketching-based skeleton generation method suitable for use in the mobile environment. This method takes user sketching as an input, and based on the mesh segmentation result of a 3D object, it estimates a skeleton for articulated character animation. In addition, we are currently developing a Web-based mobile platform to support mesh editing by a group of collaborative users and we depict the system architecture of such a platform. Results show that our method can produce better skeletons in terms of joint positions and topological structure. Keyword sketching-based skeleton generation . web-based collaboration . mesh editing in a mobile environment 1 Introduction Ubiquitous computing [40] is considered as a decent human-computer interaction (HCI) technology, which focuses on developing pervasive and context-aware technologies to make computers seamlessly immerse in our daily activities. With such a technology, computing resources are made accessible regardless of their physical locations and become intuitive for a user to access, where less or even no cognitive effort is required to pay by a user for interpreting application data structures or procedures before the user can World Wide Web (2011) 14:261–279 DOI 10.1007/s11280-010-0104-2 Q. Zheng : F. W. B. Li(*) School of Engineering and Computing Sciences, Durham University, Durham, UK e-mail: frederick.li@durham.ac.uk Q. Zheng e-mail: qingzheng.zheng@durham.ac.uk