Speaker: Daniel Thalmann (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Lausanne, Switzerland)
Simulation, VR, and Entertainment applications (games, films) needs to have Virtual Humans able to move in a flexible and elegant way. They should more and more react to the other characters and to the user. Moreover, animating crowds is challenging both in character animation and a virtual city modeling. The problem is basically to be able to generate variety among a finite set of motion requests and then to apply it to either an individual or a member of a crowd. A single autonomous agent and a member of the crowd present the same kind of 'individuality'. The only difference is at the level of the modules that control the main set of actions.
Biography
Daniel Thalmann is a pioneer in research on Virtual Humans. His current research interests include Real-time Virtual Humans in Virtual Reality, Networked Virtual Environments, Artificial Life, and Multimedia. He is coeditor-in-chief of the Journal of Visualization and Computer Animation, member of the editorial board of the Visual Computer, the CADDM Journal (China Engineering Society) and Computer Graphics (Russia). He is cochair of the EUROGRAPHICS Working Group on Computer Simulation and Animation and member of the Executive Board of the Computer Graphics Society. Daniel Thalmann was member of numerous Program Committees, Program Chair of several conferences and chair of the Computer Graphics International '93, Pacific Graphics '95, ACM VRST '97, and MMM '98 conferences. He is Program Cochair of IEEE VR 2000. He has also organized 4 courses at SIGGRAPH on human animation. He has published more than 250 papers in Graphics, Animation, and Virtual Reality. He is coeditor of 25 books, and coauthor of several books including the recent book on "Avatars in Networked Virtual Environments", published by John Wiley and Sons. He was also codirector of several computer-generated films with synthetic actors including a synthetic Marilyn shown on numerous TV channels all over the world.