Keith Waters

Last updated

Keith Waters (born 1962 in Kent, England) is a British animator who is best known for his work in the field of computer facial animation. He has received international awards from Parigraph, the National Computer Graphics Association and the Computer Animation Film Festival.

Contents

Early life

Keith Waters was born in Kent in 1962 and attended Sevenoaks School. He received his PhD from Middlesex University (UK) in 1988 after completing a BA in Graphic Design at Cat Hill Barnet. His early work on algorithms for face animation in 1986 allowed him to transfer from a MPhil to a PhD while studying under the supervision of Paul Brown and John Vince at Middlesex Polytechnic at the Centre for Advanced Studies in Computer Aided Art and Design. His studies required numerous trips to Bounds Green to use the computing facilities within the school of engineering.

Waters is best known for his work in computer facial animation that includes a muscle-based model for facial animation, a physically-based skin tissue model as well as a visual text-to-speech system called DECface. [1] He is a co-author of the book "Computer Facial Animation" [2] a guide to facial animation. The first edition published in 1995 and a second edition was published in 2008. His muscle algorithms for face animation were widely used in the computer film industry, most notably by Pixar, which first used the technique in their animation short Tin Toy.

Waters was the director of engineering device software at Nexage, prior to that a principal architect at Akamai Technologies Inc., and previously a Director of Research at Orange Labs, Boston MA, USA. Keith has been active in Human Computer Interaction (HCI) and has published scientific papers on novel applications. He has been engaged with the W3C is the development of Web standards for the mobile Web. [3]

Professional career

After graduating from the Centre for Advanced Studies in Computer Aided Art and Design (now the Lansdown Centre for Electronic Arts) at Middlesex University in 1988 with a PhD in computer graphics, Keith Waters worked for Schlumberger in Palo Alto and then at their Research Lab for Computer Science Austin Texas where he worked on parallel CM-2 data visualization. In 1991 he joined the Cambridge Research Lab of Digital Equipment Boston MA where he continued to work on user interfaces including DECface the visual equivalent of DECtalk the text-to-speech engine. Later, he went on to create the FaceWorks product that was used at Comdex. While at Compaq he invented a variety of user interfaces including the first Smart Kiosk, the invisible mouse, an image-based touchscreen and a wallable macrodevice. He worked on film and television high-performance face animation techniques at LifeF/X before joining Orange in 2001 where he became a senior expert in mobile services developing next-generation mobile Web technologies for high performance open source devices. Recently he was a principal architect at Akamai Technologies Inc., assisting them with their mobile strategy.

Awards

Keith Waters received international awards from Parigraph, the National Computer Graphics Association and the Computer Animation Film Festival for his animation shorts on face animation and in particular for the sequences of the Queen and Margaret Thatcher in 1986. The computer-generated characters were generated from the animated puppets of Spitting Image which were kindly moulded specifically for his research by Roger Law and Peter Fluck.

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Computer animation</span> Art of creating moving images using computers

Computer animation is the process used for digitally generating animations. The more general term computer-generated imagery (CGI) encompasses both static scenes and dynamic images, while computer animation only refers to moving images. Modern computer animation usually uses 3D computer graphics. The animation's target is sometimes the computer itself, while other times it is film.

The Works is a shelved 3D computer-animated feature film, partially produced from 1979 to 1986. It would have been the first entirely 3D CGI film if it had been finished as intended, and included contributions from individuals who would go on to work at digital animation pioneers Pixar and DreamWorks Animation.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lance Williams (graphics researcher)</span> American graphics researcher

Lance J. Williams was a prominent graphics researcher who made major contributions to texture map prefiltering, shadow rendering algorithms, facial animation, and antialiasing techniques. Williams was one of the first people to recognize the potential of computer graphics to transform film and video making.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ken Perlin</span> American computer scientist

Kenneth H. Perlin is a professor in the Department of Computer Science at New York University, founding director of the Media Research Lab at NYU, director of the Future Reality Lab at NYU, and the Director of the Games for Learning Institute. He holds a BA. degree in Theoretical Mathematics from Harvard University (7/1979), a MS degree in Computer Science from the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, New York University (6/1984), and a PhD degree in Computer Science from the same institution (2/1986). His research interests include graphics, animation, multimedia, and science education. He developed or was involved with the development of techniques such as Perlin noise, real-time interactive character animation, and computer-user interfaces. He is best known for the development of Perlin noise and Simplex noise, both of which are algorithms for realistic-looking Gradient noise.

Frederic Ira Parke is an American computer graphics researcher and academic. He did early work on animated computer renderings of human faces.

Computer facial animation is primarily an area of computer graphics that encapsulates methods and techniques for generating and animating images or models of a character face. The character can be a human, a humanoid, an animal, a legendary creature or character, etc. Due to its subject and output type, it is also related to many other scientific and artistic fields from psychology to traditional animation. The importance of human faces in verbal and non-verbal communication and advances in computer graphics hardware and software have caused considerable scientific, technological, and artistic interests in computer facial animation.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Marc Levoy</span>

Marc Levoy is a computer graphics researcher and Professor Emeritus of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at Stanford University, a vice president and Fellow at Adobe Inc., and a Distinguished Engineer at Google. He is noted for pioneering work in volume rendering, light fields, and computational photography.

The Lansdown Centre for Electronic Arts was a research centre at Middlesex University in North London, England. It played a significant role in the early development of computer graphics and continued to innovate in interactive media, sonic arts and moving image. It also provided postgraduate and undergraduate teaching.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hartmut Neven</span> German scientist

Hartmut Neven is a scientist working in quantum computing, computer vision, robotics and computational neuroscience. He is best known for his work in face and object recognition and his contributions to quantum machine learning. He is currently Vice President of Engineering at Google where he is leading the Quantum Artificial Intelligence Lab which he founded in 2012.

Jock D. Mackinlay is an American information visualization expert and Vice President of Research and Design at Tableau Software. With Stuart Card, George G. Robertson and others he invented a number of information visualization techniques.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lawrence J. Rosenblum</span> American mathematician

Lawrence Jay Rosenblum is an American mathematician, and Program Director for Graphics and Visualization at the National Science Foundation.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Computer graphics (computer science)</span> Sub-field of computer science

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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Computer graphics</span> Graphics created using computers

Computer graphics deals with generating images and art with the aid of computers. Today, computer graphics is a core technology in digital photography, film, video games, digital art, cell phone and computer displays, and many specialized applications. A great deal of specialized hardware and software has been developed, with the displays of most devices being driven by computer graphics hardware. It is a vast and recently developed area of computer science. The phrase was coined in 1960 by computer graphics researchers Verne Hudson and William Fetter of Boeing. It is often abbreviated as CG, or typically in the context of film as computer generated imagery (CGI). The non-artistic aspects of computer graphics are the subject of computer science research.

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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Computer-generated imagery</span> Application of computer graphics to create or contribute to images

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.

<i>A Computer Animated Hand</i> 1972 American film

A Computer Animated Hand is the title of a 1972 American computer-animated short film produced by Edwin Catmull and Fred Parke. Produced during Catmull's tenure at the University of Utah, the short was created for a graduate course project. After creating a model of his left hand, 350 triangles and polygons were drawn in ink on its surface. The model was digitized from the data and laboriously animated in a three-dimensional animation program that Catmull wrote.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Nadia Magnenat Thalmann</span> Computer scientist

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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hao Li</span> American computer scientist & university professor

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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Virtual human</span> Computer simulation of a person

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.

Steven Mark Drucker is an American computer scientist who studies how to help people understand data, and communicate their insights to others. He is a Partner at Microsoft Research, where he also serves as the Research Manager of the VIDA group. Drucker is an affiliate professor at the University of Washington Computer Science and Engineering Department.

References

  1. "Keith Waters: DECface". www.ifacelab.com. Retrieved 25 October 2019.
  2. 2nd edition: Frederic Parke and Keith Waters, Computer Facial Animation, 2008, Natick: A. K. Peters Press Ltd., 454pp. ISBN   978-1568814483
  3. Delivery Context: Client Interfaces (DCCI) 1.0. Accessing Static and Dynamic Delivery Context Properties, W3C Candidate Recommendation, 2007

Further reading