Section: Highlights of the Year

Highlights of the Year

In March 2015, Ludovic Hoyet arrived in MimeTIC has full-time Inria CR2 researcher. It's an important event for the team as it will reinforce and push the Virtual Human simulation topic in the team. Ludovic has a unique expertise in both computer animation and perceptual studies which will enable us to tackle original problems, such as developping innovative animation methods while taking the perception of the user into account, contrary to classical approaches based on dynamic simulation.

Our work “Intuitive and Efficient Camera Control with the Toric Space”, co-authored by Christophe Lino and Marc Christie has been selected at SIGGRAPH 2015, the premier and most selective computer graphics scientific event. The paper presents a novel representation to interactively and intuitively manipulate cameras, and to perform interpolations between camera keyframes while maintaining on-screen visual properties. Results of this paper, together with earlier work on automated viewpoint computation (Directors Lens patent), are now available as a plugin in Autodesk's Motion Builder. This technology is exploited by the french SME Solidanim http://www.solidanim.com through a technological transfer partnership.

Platforms in Immerstar project: Immerstar is the new name of our jointed platforms, namely Immersia on Inria campus and Immermove on ENS Campus. This year, we succeeded to end up the building of the first phase of Immermove platform. Associated with a sport area equipped with a high end motion capture system, an immersive setup has been installed. It is a L-shaped setup with 12m*4m front screen and floor. It allows to perform immersive interaction experiments between real and virtual human. To follow this first phase, and sustained by Inria and our academic institutions, we succeeded to the CPER call that will be implemented from 2016 to 2020. We will have the opportunity to invest and to improve the two immersive platforms (Immersia and Immermove) and their possibilities of distantly collaborate.

Awards

Caroline Martin won the "Jean Vives" Award for her work on the analysis of tennis serves. This price is discerned by the Académie nationale olympique française and given during the 40th congress of the Society of Biomechanics, 2015.