Ontology-Based Interactive Animation/Game Generation for Chinese Shadow Play Preservation

Interactive animation generation is an attractive area of research for current animation developers in the field of virtual reality. As an essential tool for solving problems in many research areas, using standardised and structured terminologies, an ontological analysis could concisely describe the core logic of complex systems at a high level and facilitate system design. We propose a semantic framework using ontological methods to model the construction of interactive animation and promote integration process in a systematic and standardised way. A usage example is presented to provide guidance in generating animation of hand gesture based interactive Chinese shadow puppetry play for the heritage preservation of the traditional art. Domain-specific ontologies for the Chinese traditional shadow play and hand- gesture-based interaction are developed as the ontological implementation of the framework. Finally, an animation of hand-gesture-based interactive shadow play is generated.