virtual humans: organizations and projects

• CVSSP: 3D-Vision Virtual People
  • the shape of a specific person is captured by mapping 2D silhouette information from orthogonal view colour images onto a generic 3D model

• Quantum Flux
  • "a model of human brain function which has been given life through a 3D character"
  • lots of hype and buzzwords - is it anything new or worthwhile?

• Christian Babski of LIG-EPFL
  • put up a page for Virtual Humanoids in VRML 2.0 which includes a sample humanoid
  • raises an interesting point: "It is useless to generate as many surfaces as joints for regions such as the neck/head or for the spine. All body joints will be useful when we are able to perform body envelop deformation according to their value."

• the nice folks of the Visualization and Virtual Reality Group at the NIST offer the following pages
  • anatomical Joint Descriptions
  • the interactive Kinematics 'R Us

• MIRALab, famous for Marilyn, is headed by Nadia and Daniel Thalmann
  • CHARM: Comprehensive Human Animation Resource Model
  • works together with the EPFL Computer Graphics Lab
  • BODY Proposal - extracts from the MPEG4 SNHC proposal

• The Center for Human Modeling and Simulation, famous for Jack, is headed by Norm Badler
  • Virtual Humans for Animation, Ergonomics, and Simulation
  • Real-Time Control of a Virtual Human Using Minimal Sensors
  • JackMOO home page [defunct]

• The VRML Humanoid Animation Working Group (H_ANIM)
  • VRML Humanoid Spec 1.0
  • the Virtual Humans Architecture Group (V-HAG) seems to be an ancestor/parent organization? now defunct.

• The UCSC Perceptual Science Laboratory is working on facial animation.

• Automatic Animation of Human Arm Motions
  • uses path-planning algorithms from robotics to automatically generate computer animation sequences for human figures
  • paper entitled Planning Motions with Intentions in the the conference proceedings of Siggraph '94

• The Animation Lab at Georgia Tech's Graphics, Visualization, and Usability Center
  • lots of work on simulating human motion, using SD/FAST, not in realtime

• WonderSpace was a project at Matsushita Electric Industrial, around 1997
  • whitepaper WonderSpace : A Realistic VRML Humanoid Animation Technology and Its Application
  • some cartoon avatars and work on streaming motion capture data

• Gandalf: A Communicative Humanoid
  • project of Kristinn R. Thórisson at MIT. MediaLab
  • a "talking head" that communicates -- with speech, gesture, intonation, facial expression
  • latest version is the Conversational Humanoid ("2nd generation")

• The Persona project at Microsoft Research
  • exploring social user interfaces that employ an explicitly anthropomorphic character to interact with the user in a natural spoken dialogue
  • unfortunately, they're using a cartoon parrot, not a human.

• Cutting edge virtual actress/singer Kyoko Date, the most photorealistic virtual human to date, was a product of Japan's top modeling agency
  • Kyoko Date Info Page
  • at one point, she was brought to life (realtime motion-capture) by OZ interactive.

• Bruce Lamming has a project tentatively called OOM, for creating realistic humanoid models including musculature.

• A highbrow art project - Bodies© INCorporated - claims to be a "investigation into social psychology and group dynamics, actualized in corporate structure." ... whatever! ... it uses body models from Viewpoint and lets you play with them in a VRML2 browser.

• WebManga was a weird experiment in using 3d characters in realtime on top of conventional 2D manga [no longer online]

• Many Japanese Otaku have chosen humanoid modeling as a fetishistic hobby - need current links.