Frederic I. Parke

Emotionally expressive agents

The ability to express emotions is important for creating believable interactive characters. To simulate emotional expressions in an interactive environment, an intelligent agent needs both an adaptive model for generating believable responses, and a visualization model for mapping emotions into facial expressions. Recent advances in intelligent agents and in facial modeling have produced effective algorithms for these tasks independently. We describe a method for integrating these algorithms to create an interactive simulation of an agent that produces appropriate facial expressions in a dynamic environment. Our approach to combining a model of emotions with a facial model represents a first step towards developing the technology of a truly believable interactive agent which has a wide range of applications from designing intelligent training systems to video games and animation tools.

A Facial Rigging Survey

Rigging is the process of setting up a group of controls to operate a 3D model, analogous to the strings of a puppet. It plays a fundamental role in the animation process as it eases the manipulation and editing of expressions, but rigging can be very laborious and cumbersome for an artist. This difficulty arises from the lack of a standard definition of what is a rig and the multitude approaches on how to setup a face. This survey presents a critical review on the fundamentals of rigging, with an outlook of the different techniques, their uses and problems. It describes the main problems that appear when preparing a character for animation. This paper also gives an overview of the role and relationship between the rigger and the animator. Continues with an exhaustive analysis of the published literature and previous work, centered on the facial rigging pipeline. Finally, the survey discusses future directions of facial rigging.

Evaluating performance in tiled displays: navigation and wayfinding

We compare user-interaction and performance on a navigation and way finding task across two separate immersive displays: a low-cost, tiled, multi-screen immersive visualization system and a more expensive, continuous screen, immersive visualization facility. The low-cost system is designed with economy in mind and uses off-the-shelf components. It is constructed by arranging LCD displays in a curved tiled layout. The expensive system is a Rockwell-Collins semi-rigid, rear projected, continuous curved screen. With the low cost paradigm, physical seams are introduced into the image where the displays are tiled. In contrast the expensive system presents a continuous image. We hypothesize that the tiled system presents an equivalent visual experience, despite the physical seams introduced by connecting the screens. Both systems were tested through experimentation designed to measure performance in a navigation and way finding task. Experimental results indicate that there are no significant differences in task performance across display type, which means that for navigational tasks of this category, user performance is not impacted by the interrupted image in the tiled display. Three-Dimensional (3D) immersive visualization systems provide a novel platform for presentation of complex datasets and Virtual Environments (VEs). The objective of the research presented here is to compare user-interaction and performance between two immersive displays: a low-cost, tiled, multi-screen immersive visualization system and a more expensive, continuous screen, immersive visualization facility. The low cost system is designed using off-the-shelf components and constructed by arranging LCD displays in a curved tiled layout. The expensive system is a Rockwell-Collins semi-rigid, rear projected, continuous curved screen. With the low cost paradigm, physical seams are introduced into the image where the displays are tiled. Our hypothesis is that the tiled system presents an equivalent visual experience for navigation and wayfinding tasks, despite the separating seams introduced by connecting the screens. Each immersive system was evaluated by measuring timely task performance. We compared performance on a simple goal-directed navigation task in both systems. We introduced software seams of varying size in the continuous display, but also measured performance in the continuous system with no seams. The seams in the LCD display are physical seams, and obviously remain present during task performance for that system. Results show that no significant differences exist across systems, which validates our hypothesis that there is no disruption to the visual experience of the user when navigating a VE populated with physical or software seams.

Atta texana leafcutting ant colony: a view underground

SIGGRAPH 2008, Los Angeles, California, August 11–15, 2008. ISBN 978-1-60558-466-9/08/0008

Exploring the effect of tiling on large displays

Over the past several years tiled displays have slowly evolved from expensive blended-projection systems to Liquid Crystal Display (LCD) tiled displays. The LCD systems are typically cheaper to construct and maintain, but the bezels introduced at screen edges are often a common source of complaints. Our long term research goal is to settle the debate between the two technologies to see if there really is any perceivable benefit to one versus the other. The work outlined here presents the first in a series of comparative experiments.

Lower cost modular spatially immersive visualization

The development of lower cost modular spatially immersive visualization systems based on commodity components and faceted display surfaces is described. Commodity computers are networked to form graphics computing clusters. Commodity digital projectors are used to form surrounding rear projected faceted display surfaces based on polyhedral shapes. The use of these systems in the design and evaluation of human environments is discussed.

Trends in high performance graphic systems(Panel Session)

Accompanying the rapid development of integrated circuit fabrication technology has been a parallel, but slower, development of IC design techniques and systems. Recent approaches to IC design enable individual designers to consider developing their own VLSI circuits. Such capability may open the door to a more varied set of system designs than could previously be considered in most design environments. The panel members are all currently designing graphic systems oriented towards VLSI implementation. Each will give a short presentation describing one of their system designs. Following these presentations, three members of the previous session (Forest Baskett, Andreas Bechtolsheim, and Fred Parke) will discuss common issues, problems, and future prospects.

An AR Application for Wheat Breeders

We report on an Augmented Reality interface to speed the workflow of food crop breeders. The goals of the interface are to make data collection in the field more efficient to accelerate the breeding cycle. For hardware combine the Recon Jet sports computer sunglasses and a Neutab N7 Android tablet. For software, we augment the Kansas State University open source Fieldbook application with barcode reading capability, a speech recognition interface, and information displays. We design and evaluate the application using a cohort of wheat breeders.

An evaluation of university education as it relates to the VFX, animation and game industries

This panel will discuss and assess how academia and industry can articulate their visions and develop a cohesive understanding of each others roles and responsibilities in the hopes of revealing mutually beneficial protocols and guidelines to elevate both academia and industry.

Investigating spatial understanding in multi-component displays

This poster describes an experiment designed to evaluate the effectiveness of a seven screen tiled display. Results show that there are no statistically significant differences in performance on a simple spatial task across display technology. This work can assist researchers of panoramic display systems in evaluating the optimal spatial placement of screen hardware and limits for bezel separation.