Research on virtual characters has been ongoing for the past 20 years. Early efforts focused mostly on making the characters move and speak that is, on body and facial animation. Simultaneously, researchers worked on making characters look convincing by adding animation and rendering hair, clothes, and muscles. The next step was to increase artists' interactive control over characters so that it was easier to create convincing video games and cinema.
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Kasap et al. (2009) studied this question.
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