Scripting languages(or animation languages) are useful tools to describe computer animations, especially suitable for producing animation prototypes and designing interactive animations. Scripting languages should be designed to describe various aspects of animation in a natural way. In interactive animations, it is sometimes necessary to describe non-predetermined actions. Actions are called non-predetermined when their occurring moments cannot be predicted in advance.
This thesis presents ARIA, a new scripting language for real-time interactive animations in 3D virtual environments. Using this scripting language, the animators can effectively produce the synthetic world in which human-directed avatars and computer-controlled agents interact with each other in real-time. ARIA provides features for describing non-predetermined actions and synchronization among actions in interactive animations. To execute the features of the ARIA scripting language, the ARIA script system uses the concepts of execution trees and events.
