Carol O’Sullivan
Computer Science Department
Trinity College Dublin
"Imulating and Evaluating Virtual Populace"
Abtract:
When simulating virtual objects, scenes and animations, what ultimately matters is how they are perceived by the viewer – e.g., Does a human motion look natural? Does a crowd scene look varied? Does the simulation elicit the intended emotional response from the viewer? In this talk, I will first provide a brief overview on the perception of biological motion, i.e., the motion of living (or animate) beings, especially humans, and follow that with a discussion of recent work on evaluating natural human motion. I will then consider the case of large and heterogeneous groups or crowds of people, and discuss automatic methods of generating large numbers of varied characters. Fortunately, depending on the context, it is not the case that all types of variety are equally important. Sometimes quite simple methods for creating variations that do not over-burden the computing resources available can be as effective as, and perceptually equivalent to, far more resource-intensive approaches. I will present some recent research and development efforts in Trinity College Dublin and elsewhere that aim to create and evaluate variety for characters: in their bodies, faces, movements, behaviours and sounds.
Bio
Carol O’Sullivan leads the Graphics, Vision and Visualisation group at Trinity College Dublin. Her research interests include perception, animation, virtual humans, and crowds. O’Sullivan has a PhD in computer graphics from Trinity College Dublin. She’s the program cochair of the 2009 Siggraph Symposium on Applied Perception in Graphics and Visualization, co-editor in chief of ACM Transactions on Applied Perception, and an editorial board member of IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications.
Tuesday, October 13, 2009
3:00 - 4:15
Wu & Chen
101 Levine Hall