Title:

Making It Move Easily: Evolving Poses and Animations

Abstract:

For my PhD thesis, I am concerned with developing and experiment-
ing  a  novel technique to animate articulated actors. This tech-
nique is based on the principle  of  natural  evolution.  Richard
Dawkins then Karl Sims, Stephen Todd and William Latham developed
several softwares based on this principle. Richard Dawkins  is  a
well-known biologist from Oxford and developed the first software
of the kind called biomorph. This software used a simple  grammar
similar  to l-systems to evolve visually interesting creatures in
an interactive manner. A few years later and at  about  the  same
period,  Karl  Sims  from Think Corporation and Stephen Todd with
William Latham started to use the same idea and develop software.
Karl  Sims  used  it  to  explore a space of 2D images defined by
mathematical functions whereas Stephen Todd developed a  software
which  used  a  special  grammar  to  produce  3d  creatures. The
software from Stephen Todd was further extended to produce simple
animations.

Although this technique was more and more  widely  used,  it  had
never  been  applied  to the domain of animating articulated fig-
ures. The main reason for this is the lack of strong control over
the evolving process.

In this talk, I will show how the problem of lack of control  has
been  overcome  to  produce a strong and fast posing tool. I will
then carry on explaining how full animation can be produced using
the  same tool. Although the application is still not ready for a
full test, I believe the interface to be easier and faster to use
than  most (not to say all) currently existing tools tackling the
same problem. Henceforth, I expect a lot feedback  from  the  HCI
community as my knowledge in the domain is rather limited.