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Faculty Candidate Talk
4/3/2014 11:00 am
CoRE Lecture Hall (Room 101)

What's Next? The New Era of Autonomous Virtual Humans

Mubbasir Kapadia, Disney Research, Zurich

Faculty Host: Dimitris Metaxas

Abstract

The next generation of interactive virtual world applications demand functional, purposeful, heterogeneous autonomous virtual humans, that exhibit rich, believable interactions with their environment and other agents, with the far-reaching goal of complete immersion for end users. However, there are  several underlying assumptions in virtual human simulation that are holding us back from entering into the new age of interactive virtual world applications.

In this talk, I will identify key limitations in the representation, control, locomotion, and authoring of autonomous virtual humans. These include simplified particle representations of agents which decouples control and locomotion, the lack of multi-modal perception, the need for multiple levels of control granularity, homogeneity in character animation, and monolithic agent architectures which cannot scale to complex multi-agent interactions and global narrative constraints. I will present 3 potential solutions that address these limitations with the objective of providing the stimulus for an exciting new era of virtual human research. These include: (1) a bio-mechanically based footstep locomotion model that provides a tighter coupling between control and locomotion for richer, human-like navigation behaviors, (2) a sound propagation and perception framework for autonomous agents in dynamic virtual environments, and (3) an event-centric approach to authoring complex multi-actor behaviors using parameterized behavior trees.

Bio

Mubbasir Kapadia is an Associate Research Scientist at Disney Research Zurich. Previously, he was a postdoctoral researcher and Assistant Director at the Center for Human Modeling and Simulation at University of Pennsylvania, under the directorship of Prof. Norman I. Badler. He was the project lead on the United States Army Research Laboratory (ARL) funded project Robotics Collaborative Technology Alliance (RCTA). He received his PhD in Computer Science at University of California, Los Angeles under the advisement of Professor Petros Faloutsos.

Kapadia's research aims to develop integrated solutions for full-body character animation, planning based control, behavior authoring, and statistical analysis of autonomous virtual human simulations. The far-reaching goal is to provide functional, purposeful embodied virtual humans, that act and interact in meaningful ways to simulate complex, dynamic, narrative-driven, interactive virtual worlds.

Website: http://people.inf.ethz.ch/kapadiam/