Deformable Avatars


Book Description

Deformable avatars are virtual humans that deform themselves during motion. This implies facial deformations, body deformations at joints, and global deformations. Simulating deformable avatars ensures a more realistic simulation of virtual humans. The research requires models for capturing of geometrie and kinematic data, the synthesis of the realistic human shape and motion, the parametrisation and motion retargeting, and several appropriate deformation models. Once a deformable avatar has been created and animated, the researcher must model high-level behavior and introduce agent technology. The book can be divided into 5 subtopics: 1. Motion capture and 3D reconstruction 2. Parametrie motion and retargeting 3. Musc1es and deformation models 4. Facial animation and communication 5. High-level behaviors and autonomous agents Most of the papers were presented during the IFIP workshop "DEFORM '2000" that was held at the University of Geneva in December 2000, followed by "A V AT ARS 2000" held at EPFL, Lausanne. The two workshops were sponsored by the "Troisü!me Cycle Romand d'Informatique" and allowed participants to discuss the state of research in these important areas. x Preface We would like to thank IFIP for its support and Yana Lambert from Kluwer Academic Publishers for her advice. Finally, we are very grateful to Zerrin Celebi, who has prepared the edited version of this book and Dr. Laurent Moccozet for his collaboration.




Online Communities and Social Computing


Book Description

The 13th International Conference on Human–Computer Interaction, HCI Inter- tional 2009, was held in San Diego, California, USA, July 19–24, 2009, jointly with the Symposium on Human Interface (Japan) 2009, the 8th International Conference on Engineering Psychology and Cognitive Ergonomics, the 5th International Conference on Universal Access in Human–Computer Interaction, the Third International Conf- ence on Virtual and Mixed Reality, the Third International Conference on Internati- alization, Design and Global Development, the Third International Conference on Online Communities and Social Computing, the 5th International Conference on Augmented Cognition, the Second International Conference on Digital Human Mod- ing, and the First International Conference on Human Centered Design. A total of 4,348 individuals from academia, research institutes, industry and gove- mental agencies from 73 countries submitted contributions, and 1,397 papers that were judged to be of high scientific quality were included in the program. These papers - dress the latest research and development efforts and highlight the human aspects of the design and use of computing systems. The papers accepted for presentation thoroughly cover the entire field of human–computer interaction, addressing major advances in knowledge and effective use of computers in a variety of application areas.




Stepping into Virtual Reality


Book Description

Virtual reality techniques are increasingly becoming indispensable in many areas. This book looks at how to generate advanced virtual reality worlds. It covers principles, techniques, devices and mathematical foundations, beginning with basic definitions, and then moving on to the latest results from current research and exploring the social implications of these. Very practical in its approach, the book is fully illustrated in colour and contains numerous examples, exercises and case studies. This textbook will allow students and practitioners alike to gain a practical understanding of virtual reality concepts, devices and possible applications.




Stepping into Virtual Reality


Book Description

Virtual reality techniques are increasingly becoming indispensable in many areas. This book looks at how to generate advanced virtual reality worlds. It covers principles, techniques, devices and mathematical foundations, beginning with basic definitions, and then moving on to the latest results from current research and exploring the social implications of these. Very practical in its approach, the book is fully illustrated in colour and contains numerous examples, exercises and case studies. This textbook will allow students and practitioners alike to gain a practical understanding of virtual reality concepts, devices and possible applications.




Smart Grapics


Book Description

The International Symposium on Smart Graphics 2003 was held on July 2–4, 2003 in Heidelberg, Germany. It was the fourth event in a series that started in 1999 as an AAAI Spring Symposium. In response to the overwhelming success of the 1999 symposium, its organizers decided to turn it into a self-contained event in2000. WiththesupportofIBM,the?rsttwoInternationalSymposiaonSmart Graphics were held at the T. J. Watson Research Center in Hawthorne, NY. The 2003 symposium was supported by the Klaus Tschira Foundation and moved to the European Media Lab in Heidelberg, thus underlining the international character of the Smart Graphics enterprise and its community. The core idea behind these symposia is to bring together researchers and practitioners from the ?eld of computer graphics, arti?cial intelligence, cog- tive psychology, and ?ne art. Each of these disciplines contributes to what we mean by the term “Smart Graphics”: the intelligent process of creating expr- sive and esthetic graphical presentations. While artists and designers have been creating communicative graphics for centuries, arti?cial intelligence focuses on automating this process by means of the computer. While computer graphics provides the tools for creating graphical presentations in the ?rst place, cog- tive sciences contribute the rules and models of perception necessary for the design of e?ective graphics. The exchange of ideas between these four discip- nes has led to many exciting and fruitful discussions, and the Smart Graphics Symposia draw their liveliness from a spirit of open minds and the willingness to learn from and share with other disciplines.




Intelligent Virtual Agents


Book Description

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 7th International Workshop on Intelligent Virtual Agents, IVA 2007, held in Paris, France, September 2007. The 19 revised full papers and 12 revised short papers presented together with five invited talks and the abstracts of 32 poster papers are organized in topical sections on rendering and analysis, culture and identity, behavior models, feedback models, dialogues, applications, evaluation, gaze models and emotions.




Facets of Virtual Environments


Book Description

In recent years, the popularity of virtual worlds has increased significantly and they have consequently come under closer academic scrutiny. Papers about virtual worlds are typically published at conferences or in journals that specialize in something - tirely different, related to some secondary aspect of the research. Thus a paper d- cussing legal aspects of virtual worlds may be published in a law journal, while a psychologist's analysis of situation awareness may appear at a psychology conference. The downside of this is that if you publish a virtual worlds paper at an unrelated conference in this manner you are likely to be one of only a handful of attendees working in the area. You will not, therefore, achieve the most important goal of - tending conferences: meeting and conversing with like-minded colleagues from the academic community of your field of study. Virtual worlds touch on many well-established themes in other areas of science. Researchers from all these fields will therefore be looking at this new, interesting, and growing field. However, to do effective research related to these complex constructs, researchers need to take into account many of the other facets from other fields that impact virtual worlds. Only by being familiar with and paying attention to all these different aspects can virtual worlds be properly understood.




New Advances in Virtual Humans


Book Description

In this book, various aspects of cognitive and emotional behaviour is described. In chapter one, a state of the art introduction to VH is presented and the associated research is given. In Chapter 2, cognitive and emotions processes are described. A Comprehensive context model for multi-party interactions with the VH is given in the next chapter. Finally, it is very important to model the socializing of groups of virtual humans. This is discussed in Chapter 4. The automatic modelling of expressions for VH is described in Chapter 5. The last chapter gives a case study of an intelligent kios avatar and its usability. This book gives examples of some advances that enable VH to behave intelligently. It provides an overview of these research problems and some unsolved problems.




Computational Science and Its Applications - ICCSA 2005


Book Description

The four volume set assembled following The 2005 International Conference on Computational Science and its Applications, ICCSA 2005, held in Suntec International Convention and Exhibition Centre, Singapore, from 9 May 2005 till 12 May 2005, represents the ?ne collection of 540 refereed papers selected from nearly 2,700 submissions. Computational Science has ?rmly established itself as a vital part of many scienti?c investigations, a?ecting researchers and practitioners in areas ranging from applications such as aerospace and automotive, to emerging technologies such as bioinformatics and nanotechnologies, to core disciplines such as ma- ematics, physics, and chemistry. Due to the shear size of many challenges in computational science, the use of supercomputing, parallel processing, and - phisticated algorithms is inevitable and becomes a part of fundamental t- oretical research as well as endeavors in emerging ?elds. Together, these far reaching scienti?c areas contribute to shape this Conference in the realms of state-of-the-art computational science research and applications, encompassing the facilitating theoretical foundations and the innovative applications of such results in other areas.




Agent Culture


Book Description

This volume began with a workshop of the Austrian Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence held in 2001. Concerned with embodied agents as cultural objects and subjects, the book is divided into three parts. It begins by drawing attention to the cultural embeddedness of technology in general and agent design in particular, as a reminder that