Details of Grant 

EPSRC Reference:	EP/H02977X/1
Title:	Performance based expressive virtual characters
Principal Investigator:	Gillies, Dr M
Other Investigators:
Researcher Co-Investigators:
Project Partners:
Department:	Computing Department
Organisation:	Goldsmiths College
Scheme:	First Grant - Revised 2009
Starts:	21 September 2010	Ends:	01 March 2012	Value (£):	100,636
EPSRC Research Topic Classifications:	Artificial Intelligence Computer Graphics & Visual. Multimedia
EPSRC Industrial Sector Classifications:	Creative Industries
Related Grants:
Panel History:	Panel Date Panel Name Outcome 02 Feb 2010 ICT Prioritisation Panel (Feb 10) Announced
Summary on Grant Application Form
Creating believable, expressive interactive characters is one of the great, and largely unsolved, technical challenges of interactive media. Human-like characters appear throughout interactive media, virtual worlds and games and are vital to the social and narrative aspects of these media, but they rarely have the psychological depth of expression found in other media. This proposal is for the development of research into a new approach to creating interactive characters which identifies the central problem of current methods as being the fact that creating the interactive behaviour, or Artificial Intelligence (AI), of a character is still primarily a programming task, and therefore in the hands of people with a technical rather than an artistic training. Our hypothesis is that the actors' artistic understanding of human behaviour will bring an individuality, subtlety and nuance to the character that it would be difficult to create in hand authored models. This will help interactive media represent more nuanced social interaction, thus broadening their range of application. The proposed research will use information from an actor's performance to determine the parameters of a character's behaviour software. We will use Motion Capture to record an actor interacting with another person. The recorded data will be used as input to a machine learning algorithm that will infer the parameters of a behavioural control model for the character. This model will then be used to control a real time animated character in interaction with a person. The interaction will be a full body interaction involving motion tracking of posture and/or gestures, and voice input.In entertainment this method will enable more social genres and help improve the current limited demographic. It will also enable a number of new applications in education, rehabilitation, media and marketing. Putting actors in charge of creating character AI will also make production pipelines more efficient be requiring less input from programmers This project is timely in that it brings together a number of active and developing research fields including expressive virtual characters, motion capture based animation and machine learning. It has the potential to transform current research in expressive virtual characters and present new research problems for machine learning and motion capture based animation. It is novel in that it proposes a fundamentally new approach to creating interactive characters and it combines disciplines such as animation, statistical machine learning, performance, affective computing, human computer interaction and psychology. The use of both machine learning and performance for virtual characters is particularly novel.
Key Findings
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Potential use in non-academic contexts
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Impacts
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Sectors submitted by the Researcher
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Project URL:	http://www.doc.gold.ac.uk/~mas02mg/MarcoGillies/?p=250
Further Information:
Organisation Website:	http://www.gold.ac.uk