Publications by Daniel Thalmann

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Real-time crowd motion planning requires fast, realistic methods for path planning as well as obstacle avoidance. The difﬁculty to ﬁnd a satisfying trade-off between efﬁciency and believability is particularly challenging, and prior techniques tend to focu ...

We explore an approach to full-body motion edit- ing with linear motion models, prioritized constraint-based optimization and latent-space interpolation. By exploiting the mathematical connections between linear motion mod- els and prioritized inverse kine ...

Instead of the reality in which you can see your own limbs, in virtual reality simulations it is sometimes disturbing not to be able to see your own body. It seems to create an issue in the proprioperception of the user who does not completely feel integra ...

This article addresses visualization of deformation or shape differences between bones while conventional visualization techniques are often about a single bone such as its 3D reconstruction. Given a pair of bones with a set of corresponding anatomical landmarks, we compute displacement vectors describing the deformation from one bone to the other at the landmark points on one of the bones. Out of these prescribed ones, a displacement vector at each vertex on the bone surface is derived using a multi-level

Computer simulation of human facial expressions requires an interactive ability to create arbitrary faces and to provide a controlled simulation of expressions on these faces. The system describes in this paper presents the interactive facilities for simulating abstract muscle actions using free form deformations (FFD). The particular muscle action is simulated as the displacement of the control points of the control-unit for an FFD defined on a region of interest. One or several simulated muscle actions co

In this paper we present an object representation based on the semantics and functionality of interactive digital items - virtual objects - within a virtual environment (VE). We consider every object participating in a VE application not only as a 3D shape ...

Migrating computer graphics to the Web poses several problems, but with new standards and technology advances, graphics applications can balance latency and bandwidth constraints with image quality. The paper discusses Web graphics standards, distributed v ...

Motion LoD (Level of Detail) is a preprocessing technique that generates multiple details of captured motion by eliminating joints. This LoD technique is applied to movie, game or VR environments for the purpose of improving speed of crowd animation. So fa ...

COVEN (Collaborative Virtual Environments) is a European project that seeks to develop a comprehensive approach to the issues in the development of collaborative virtual environment (CVE) technology. COVEN brings together twelve academic and industrial partners with a wide range of expertise in CSCW, networked VR, computer graphics, human factors, HCI, and telecommunications infrastructures. After two years of work, we are presenting the main features of our approach and results, our driving applications, t

Recent progress in 3-D capture technology has made it possible to obtain much of realistic motion data of human subjects. Being captured in high frame rates, compression or extraction of key postures out of the motion data is useful for storage, transfer and browsing among them: this can serve as an Important pre-processing for applications such as rehabilitation, ergonomics and sports physiology. This paper addresses these problems by treating the motion date as trajectory curves In a high-dimensional spac

We present a versatile, behavioral, and rule-based animation system that includes autonomous humanoid actors whose behavior is based on synthetic sensors that are used for perceiving the virtual environment. We combine the following in a consistent approach: L-systems, a behavioral production rule system; a particle system; an acoustic environment model, including a speech recognition module; a virtual life network; and a humanoid library. Together, these systems create a real-time-structured virtual enviro

We present a visualization framework for exploring and analyzing data sets from biomechanical and neuromuscular simulations. These data sets describe versatile information related to the different stages of a motion analysis. In studying these data using a ...

The new breed of Personal Digital Assistants (PDA) and mobile phones have enough computing power to display 3D graphics. These new mobile devices (handhelds) have some other interesting communication and interaction possibilities as well. In this paper we explore the potential applications of 3D virtual humans inside mobile devices and the use of such handhelds as control interfaces to drive the virtual humans and navigate through their virtual environments.

We describe an approach to construct interactive virtual environments, which are suitable for the development of artificial virtual human life simulations. Our main goal is to have virtual human actors living and working autonomously in virtual environments. In our approach, virtual actors have their own motivations and needs, and by sensing and exploring their environment, an action selection mechanism is able to determine at anytime the suitable actions to take. We adapt basic actor motivations and needs

We propose a method to simulate human bodies based on anatomy concepts. We believe that the closer our model is to reality, the better our results will be. Using this approach, we are developing our human representation. Our model is divided into three layers and presented in three steps: the concept of a rigid body from a real skeleton, the muscle design and deformation based on physical concepts, and skin generation. Muscles are represented at two levels: the action lines and the muscle shape. The action

Synchronization of speech, facial expressions and body gestures is one of the most critical problems in realistic avatar animation in virtual environments. In this paper, we address this problem by proposing a new high-level animation language to describe avatar animation. The Avatar Markup Language (AML), based on XML, encapsulates the Text to Speech, Facial Animation and Body Animation in a unified manner with appropriate synchronization. We use low-level animation parameters, defined by the MPEG-4 standa

By nature, human beings perceive their environment mostly using sight and audition. Vibrotactile feedback has proven satisfying results in the domains of simple multimodal interaction, for immersion and navigation purposes. The scope of this research is to ...

We propose a method to simulate muscle deformation in real-time, still aiming at satisfying visual results; that is, we are not attempting perfect simulation but building a useful tool for interactive applications. Muscles are represented at 2 levels: the action lines and the muscle shape. The action line represents the force produced by a muscle on the bones, while the muscle shapes used in the simulation consist of a surface based model fitted to the boundary of medical image data. The algorithm to model

This paper presents a solution to interactive navigation planning and real-time simulation of a very large number of entities moving in a virtual environment. From the environment geometry analysis, we deduce a structure called navigation graph, which is t ...

Daniel Thalmann

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Real-Time Scalable Motion Planning for Crowds

Latent motion spaces for full-body motion editing

The Benefits of Third-Person Perspective in Virtual and Augmented Reality?

Colored visualization of shape differences between bones

Colored visualization of shape differences between bones

3D interactive free form deformations for facial expressions

Semantics-based representation of virtual environments

Emerging Web graphics standards and technologies

Automated Motion LoD with Rigid Constraints

The COVEN project: exploring applicative, technical, and usage dimensions of collaborative virtual environments

Key-posture extraction out of human motion data

A rule-based interactive behavioral animation system for humanoids

A visualization framework for the analysis of neuromuscular simulations

Controlling Virtual Humans Using PDAs

Towards real time virtual human life simulations

Anatomic modeling of deformable human bodies

Avatar Markup Language

Vibrotactile Jacket For Perception Enhancement

Real time muscle deformations using mass-spring systems

Crowds of Moving Objects: Navigation Planning and Simulation