Publications by Daniel Thalmann

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Nowadays, several techniques exist to render digital content such as graphics, audio, haptic, etc. Unfortunately, they require different faculties that cannot always be applied, e.g. providing a picture to a blind person would be useless. In this paper, we ...

The paper describes an animation approach where synthetic vision is used for navigation by a digital actor. The vision is the only channel of information between the actor and its environment and offers a universal approach to pass the necessary information from the environment to an actor in the problems of path searching, obstacle avoidance, and internal knowledge representation with learning and forgetting characteristics. For the general navigation problem, we propose a local and a global approach. In t

Presents an open testbed for controlling facial animation. The adopted controlling means can act at different levels of abstraction (specification). These means of control can be associated with different interactive devices and media, thereby allowing a greater flexibility and freedom to the animator. The possibility of integration and mixing of control means provides a general platform where a user can experiment with his choice of control method. Experiments with input accessories like the keyboard of a

We extend the range of inverse kinematics by integrating mass distribution information to embody the position control of the center of gravity of any articulated figure in single support (open tree structure). The underlying control architecture of main and secondary behaviors (or tasks) is used to associate this new approach to other behaviors. We evaluate the use of these techniques for motion control and we present cascaded control as a way of hierarchically combining balance and other goal oriented beha

In the context of cognitive and behavioural therapies, the use of immersion technologies to replace classical exposure often improves the therapeutic process. As it is necessary to validate the efficiency of such a technique, both therapists and VR special ...

This paper presents an innovative 3D reconstruction of ancient fresco paintings through the real-time revival of their fauna and flora, featuring groups of virtual animated characters with artificial-life dramaturgical behaviours in an immersive, fully mob ...

We focus on the research required to establish a foundation for the evolving needs of visualization systems. Three main topics underpin these needs: models, the need for abstractions to describe the core components of the visualization process and the interfaces between them, including users and their behavior; validation, the problem of determining whether visualizations meet consistency and effectiveness criteria on test data or measures; and systems, the design, realization, and operational problems of s

Using intelligent virtual assistants for controlling employee population in workspaces is a research area that remains unexplored. This paper presents a novel application of virtual humans to enforce Covid-19 safety measures in a corporate workplace. For t ...

Current research of designing prosthetic robotic hands mainly focuses on improving their functionality by devising new mechanical structures and actuation systems. Most of existing work relies on a single structure/system (e.g., bone-only or tissue-only) a ...

The author presents a user interaction methodology based on a six degree of freedom interactive input device called the Spaceball. This methodology is geared for computer graphics applications that require items to be positioned or displaced in three-dimensional space in a purely visual and esthetic fashion. When the Spaceball device is used in conjunction with a common 2-D mouse-the Spaceball device held in one hand and the mouse in other-overall visual depth perception on traditional 2-D displays can be c

Virtual Human (VH) creation aims to provide virtual characters with realistic behavior, which implies endowing them with autonomy in an inhabited virtual environment. Autonomous behavior consists in interacting with users or the environment and reacting to stimuli. Reactions are unconscious behaviors that are not often implemented in virtual humans. Frequently, virtual humans show repetitive and robotic movements which tend to decrease realism. To improve believability in virtual humans we need to provide c

Concerned with interpolation between two objects defined using a faceted representation. The interpolation function is not examined, but the paper emphasizes the problem of correspondence between the two given key drawings. The problem is much more complex than interpolation between line drawings, because the two key drawings generally have a different total number of vertices, a different total number of facets and corresponding facets have a different number of vertices. A general algorithm is proposed ba

Achieving effective facial emotional expressivity within a real-time rendering constraint requests to leverage on all possible inspiration sources and especially from the observations of real individuals. One of them is the frequent asymmetry of facial exp ...

We present a system that exploits advanced Virtual Reality technologies to create a surveillance and security system. Surveillance cameras are carried by a mini Blimp which is tele-operated using an innovative Virtual Reality interface with haptic feedback ...

Despite the wide amount of computer graphics frameworks and solutions available, it is still difficult to find a perfect one fitting at the same time many constraints, like pedagogical intents and user-friendliness or speed with high rendering quality and ...

Many problems exist in synthetic human modeling because of the limitations of current models. The paper discusses the use of finite-element analysis for the computer animation of humans in contact with their environment. The authors' hybrid animation system is described, and the deformations due to contact forces generated during the pressing of a soft ball by a finger are modeled using FEM-based simulation of the environment and of the skin. An appropriate algorithm is presented. The limitations of the cur

Computer animation may be defined as a technique in which the illusion of movement is created by displaying on a screen or recording on a device a series of individual states of a dynamic scene. The key issue of computer animation is defining motion, commonly known as motion control methods (MCMs). MCMs may be classified according to the nature of the information that is directly manipulated: geometric, physical, or behavioral

Rendering and animating a multitude of articulated characters in real-time presents a real challenge, and few hardware systems are up to the task. Up to now, little research has been conducted to tackle the issue of real-time rendering of numerous virtual humans. However, due to the growing interest in collaborative virtual environments, the demand for numerous realistic avatars is becoming stronger. This paper presents a hardware-independent technique that improves the display rate of animated characters b

Vision-based hand pose estimation is important in human-computer interaction. While many recent works focus on full degree-of-freedom hand pose estimation, robust estimation of global hand pose remains a challenging problem. This paper presents a novel alg ...

In this paper we address the problem of creating accurate joint models from real motions while allowing scalability. We propose an automatic method to model, scale, and simulate non-idealized joints from the external motion of markers. We demonstrate the method on the human knee joint modeling for musculoskeletal analysis and for character animation. The resulting joints, called correlative joints, are character and motion independent and rely on linear combinations of degrees of freedom calculated from mul

Daniel Thalmann

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Context aware, multimodal, and semantic rendering engine

Navigation for digital actors based on synthetic vision, memory, and learning

A multimedia testbed for facial animation control

A robust approach for the control of the center of mass with inverse kinetics

Using physiological measures for emotional assessment: A computer-aided tool for cognitive and behavioral therapy

Mixing virtual and real scenes in the site of ancient Pompeii

Research issues in the foundations of visualization

Virtual Safety Assistant: An Efficient Tool for Ensuring Safety During Covid-19 Pandemic

Fast 3D Modeling of Prosthetic Robotic Hands Based on a Multi-Layer Deformable Design

Sculpting with the `ball and mouse' metaphor

Semantic Representation of Individualized Reaction Movements for Virtual Human

A general algorithm for 3-D shape interpolation in a facet-based representation

Conveying Real-Time Ambivalent Feelings through Asymmetric Facial Expressions

Advanced virtual reality technologies for surveillance and security applications

The Mental Vision framework - A platform for teaching, practicing and researching with computer graphics and virtual reality

Modeling of contact deformations between a synthetic human and its environment

Computer animation

Animated impostors for real-time display of numerous virtual humans

Hough Forest With Optimized Leaves for Global Hand Pose Estimation With Arbitrary Postures

Correlative joint definition for motion analysis and animation