EPFL is a public research university in Lausanne, Switzerland. Established in 1969, it has placed itself as a public research university specializing in engineering and natural sciences.
Crowd simulation is the process of simulating the movement of a large number of entities or characters. It is commonly used to create virtual scenes for visual media like films and video games, and is also used in crisis training, architecture and urban planning, and evacuation simulation.
Skeletal animation or rigging is a technique in computer animation in which a character is represented in two parts: a surface representation used to draw the character and a hierarchical set of interconnected parts, a virtual armature used to animate the mesh. While this technique is often used to animate humans and other organic figures, it only serves to make the animation process more intuitive, and the same technique can be used to control the deformation of any object—such as a door, a spoon, a building, or a galaxy. When the animated object is more general than, for example, a humanoid character, the set of "bones" may not be hierarchical or interconnected, but simply represent a higher-level description of the motion of the part of mesh it is influencing.
Eurographics is a Europe-wide professional computer graphics association. The association supports its members in advancing the state of the art in computer graphics and related fields such as multimedia, scientific visualization and human–computer interaction.
Thomas Albert "Tom" DeFanti is an American computer graphics researcher and pioneer. His work has ranged from early computer animation, to scientific visualization, virtual reality, and grid computing. He is a distinguished professor of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and a research scientist at the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2).
A virtual human, virtual persona, or digital clone is the creation or re-creation of a human being in image and voice using computer-generated imagery and sound, that is often indistinguishable from the real actor.
Computer graphics is a sub-field of computer science which studies methods for digitally synthesizing and manipulating visual content. Although the term often refers to the study of three-dimensional computer graphics, it also encompasses two-dimensional graphics and image processing.
Dinesh Manocha is an Indian-American computer scientist and the Paul Chrisman Iribe Professor of Computer Science at University of Maryland College Park, formerly at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His research interests are in scientific computation, robotics, self-driving cars, affective computing, virtual and augmented reality and 3D computer graphics.
The history of computer animation began as early as the 1940s and 1950s, when people began to experiment with computer graphics – most notably by John Whitney. It was only by the early 1960s when digital computers had become widely established, that new avenues for innovative computer graphics blossomed. Initially, uses were mainly for scientific, engineering and other research purposes, but artistic experimentation began to make its appearance by the mid-1960s – most notably by Dr. Thomas Calvert. By the mid-1970s, many such efforts were beginning to enter into public media. Much computer graphics at this time involved 2-D imagery, though increasingly as computer power improved, efforts to achieve 3-D realism became the emphasis. By the late 1980s, photo-realistic 3-D was beginning to appear in film movies, and by mid-1990s had developed to the point where 3-D animation could be used for entire feature film production.
Computer-generated imagery (CGI) is a specific-technology or application of computer graphics for creating or improving images in art, printed media, simulators, videos and video games. These images are either static or dynamic. CGI both refers to 2D computer graphics and 3D computer graphics with the purpose of designing characters, virtual worlds, or scenes and special effects. The application of CGI for creating/improving animations is called computer animation, or CGI animation.
Nadia Magnenat Thalmann is a computer graphics scientist and robotician and is the founder and head of MIRALab at the University of Geneva. She has chaired the Institute for Media Innovation at Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore from 2009 to 2021.
Hao Li is a computer scientist, innovator, and entrepreneur from Germany, working in the fields of computer graphics and computer vision. He is co-founder and CEO of Pinscreen, Inc, as well as associate professor of computer vision at the Mohamed Bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI). He was previously a Distinguished Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley, an associate professor of computer science at the University of Southern California, and former director of the Vision and Graphics Lab at the USC Institute for Creative Technologies. He was also a visiting professor at Weta Digital and a research lead at Industrial Light & Magic / Lucasfilm.
Twixt was a 3D computer animation system originally created in 1984 by Julian Gomez at Sun Microsystems. It featured keyframes and tweening in a track-based graphical interface, and was capable of real-time wireframe playback. An Apple Macintosh port, called MacTwixt, was the first known 3D animation software to be released for the Macintosh. It was used by Apple's Advanced Technology Group to create the 1988 short film Pencil Test. Twixt was maintained until 1987 by Cranston/Csuri Productions, and used in their animated television and advertising projects.
Dream Flight is a 3-D computer-animated short fiction film completely produced by computer. The film was created in 1982 at the University of Montreal and was directed by Philippe Bergeron, Nadia Magnenat Thalmann and Daniel Thalmann.
Rendez-vous in Montreal is a 1987 animated film that used advanced computer techniques to achieve such effects as modelling the film stars Marilyn Monroe and Humphrey Bogart. The film was directed by Nadia Magnenat Thalmann and Daniel Thalmann and produced with a team of 10 people. Specific interactive software [1] was developed that allowed designers to interactively use commands to generate the sequences. The main purpose of Rendez-vous in Montreal was to show that true synthetic actors can be created. This film represented a technological breakthrough both on the software side and the film itself.
Nadine is a gynoid humanoid social robot that is modelled on Professor Nadia Magnenat Thalmann. The robot has a strong human-likeness with a natural-looking skin and hair and realistic hands. Nadine is a socially intelligent robot which returns a greeting, makes eye contact, and can remember all the conversations had with it. It is able to answer questions autonomously in several languages, simulate emotions both in gestures and facially, depending on the content of the interaction with the user. Nadine can recognise persons it has previously seen, and engage in flowing conversation. Nadine has been programmed with a "personality", in that its demeanour can change according to what is said to it. Nadine has a total of 27 degrees of freedom for facial expressions and upper body movements. With persons it has previously encountered, it remembers facts and events related to each person. It can assist people with special needs by reading stories, showing images, put on Skype sessions, send emails, and communicate with other members of the family. It can play the role of a receptionist in an office or be dedicated to be a personal coach.
Bedrich Benes is a computer scientist and a researcher in computer graphics.
Michael Kass is an American computer scientist best known for his work in computer graphics and computer vision. He has won an Academy Award and the SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics Achievement Award and is an ACM Fellow.
Video games in Switzerland have been released since the 1980s. In 2016, there were between 100 and 120 game companies, mostly small, corresponding to about 500 employees and a turnover of about 50 millions Swiss francs.
A virtual human is a software fictional character or human being. Virtual human have been created as tools and artificial companions in simulation, video games, film production, human factors and ergonomic and usability studies in various industries, clothing industry, telecommunications (avatars), medicine, etc. These applications require domain-dependent simulation fidelity. A medical application might require an exact simulation of specific internal organs; film industry requires highest aesthetic standards, natural movements, and facial expressions; ergonomic studies require faithful body proportions for a particular population segment and realistic locomotion with constraints, etc.
