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Chinese brush calligraphy is a valuable civilization legacy and a high art of scholarship. It is still popular in Chinese banners, newspaper mastheads, university names, and celebration gifts. There are Web sites that try to help people enjoy and learn Chinese calligraphy. However, there lacks advanced services such as content-based retrieval or vivid writing process simulation for calligraphy learning. This article proposes a novel Chinese calligraphy learning approach: First, the scanned calligraphy pages were segmented into individual calligraphy characters using minimum-bounding box. Second, the individual character's feature information was extracted and kept. Then, a corresponding database was built to serve as a map between the feature data and the original raw data. Finally, a retrieval engine was constructed and a dynamic writing process was simulated to help learners get the calligraphy character they were interested in and watch how it was generated step by step. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In motion simulations, video games and animation films, lots of interactions between characters and virtual environments are needed. Even though realistic motion data can be derived from MoCap system, motion editing and synthesis, animators must adapt these motion data to specific virtual environment manually, which is a boring and time-consuming job. Here we propose a framework to program the movements of characters and generate navigation animations in virtual environment. Given a virtual environment, a visual user interface is provided for animators to interactively generate motion scripts, describing the characters' movements in this scene and finally used to retrieve motion clips from MoCap database and generate navigation animations automatically. This framework also provides flexible mechanism for animators to get varied resulting animations by configurable table of motion bias coefficients and interactive visual user interface. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]