willpose

Willpose is a conceptual framework in computer vision and digital animation for representing and interpreting the intentionality behind human poses and movements. Unlike conventional pose estimation, which aims to reconstruct body configuration at an instant, willpose seeks to infer the underlying intention that generated a sequence of poses, such as signaling readiness, agreement, or instruction. The term blends will with pose to emphasize intentionality as distinct from static posture.

Origins and usage: The term emerged in mid- to late-2020s in academic and industry discussions about making avatars more expressive. It is not yet a formal standard, but serves as a descriptive category for methods that link movement dynamics to communicative intent rather than to geometry alone.

Technical approach: Willpose methods generally combine pose data (skeletal data or motion capture) with temporal modeling and labeled intent annotations. Representations may be discrete intent categories or continuous intention scores. Models may use recurrent architectures, transformers, or probabilistic frameworks to map pose trajectories to likely intents, sometimes integrating contextual information such as scene or dialogue.

Applications and challenges: In telepresence, gaming, and human–robot interaction, willpose can enable more natural, intent-aware avatars and control schemes. Challenges include ambiguity of intent from a single pose, dependence on context, cultural differences, data requirements for annotations, and concerns about privacy and misinterpretation.

See also: pose estimation; action recognition; intention recognition; human–computer interaction; computer animation.