Seminar presentation by new V-SENSE member Dr. Rogerio da Silva!

Presenter: Dr. Rogerio da Silva, V-SENSE Postdoctoral Research Fellow

Date & Time: 4pm, Thursday, 22nd March.

Venue: Large Conference Room, O’Reilly Institute (ORI LCR)

Title:  Creating Partly Autonomous Expressive Virtual Actors for Computer Animation

Abstract:

Autonomous digital actors represent the next stage in the animation industry in its search for novel processes for authoring character-based animations. In this research, we drawn a list of requirements for a proposed autonomous agent architecture for digital actors. The purpose of this was to suggest an improvement in the current technology on digital actors and the way “believable” characters are used by the game and animation industries. Our solution considers three main layers in terms of what skills autonomous actors should display: ?rst, they should be able to interpret script representations autonomously; second, there is a deliberation phase which aims at implementing an agent architecture to work out suitable ways of enacting the previously interpreted script and third, these enactments are translated into animation commands that are suitable for a given animation engine. Although determining the best process for creating autonomous digital actors remains an open question, we believe that this thesis provides a better understanding of some of its components, and can lead towards the development of the ?rst fully functional autonomous digital actor.