Distinguished Lecture Series

Interfaces for Controlling Human CharactersProf. Jessica HodginsSchool of Computer Science
Carnegie Mellon UniversityABSTRACTComputer animations and virtual environments both require a controllable source of motion for their characters. Most of the currently available technologies require significant training and are not useful tools for casual users. Over the past few years, we have explored several different approaches to this problem. Each solution relies on the information about natural human motion inherent in a motion capture database. For example, the user can sketch an approximate path for an animated character which is then refined by searching a graph constructed from a motion database. We can also find a natural looking motion for a particular behavior based on sparse constraints from the user (foot contact locations and timing, for example) by optimizing in a low-dimensional, behavior-specific space found from motion capture. And finally, we have developed performance animation systems that use video input of the user to build a local model of the user's motion and reproduce it on an animated character. BIOGRAPHY Jessica Hodgins is a Professor in the Robotics Institute and Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University. Prior to moving to CMU in 2000, she was an an Associate Professor and Assistant Dean in the College of Computing at Georgia Institute of Technology. She received her Ph.D. in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University in 1989.
Her research focuses on computer graphics, animation, and robotics.
She has received a NSF Young Investigator Award, a Packard Fellowship, and a Sloan Fellowship. She was editor-in-chief of ACM Transactions on Graphics from 2000-2002 and SIGGRAPH Papers Chair in 2003.

Location: Seaver Science Library (SSL) - 150

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Nancy Levien