Section: Partnerships and Cooperations

National Initiatives

ANR

Cinecitta

Participants : Marc Christie [contact] , Cunka Sanokho, Quentin Galvane, Christophe Lino, Hui-Yin Wu.

Cinecitta is a 3-year young researcher project funded by the French Research Agency (ANR) lead by Marc Christie. The project started in October 2012 and will end in March 2016. The main objective of Cinecitta is to propose and evaluate a novel workflow which mixes user interaction using motion-tracked cameras and automated computation aspects for interactive virtual cinematography that will better support user creativity. We propose a novel cinematographic workflow that features a dynamic collaboration of a creative human filmmaker with an automated virtual camera planner. We expect the process to enhance the filmmaker’s creative potential by enabling very rapid exploration of a wide range of viewpoint suggestions. The process has the potential to enhance the quality and utility of the automated planner’s suggestions by adapting and reacting to the creative choices made by the filmmaker. This requires three advances in the field. First, the ability to generate relevant viewpoint suggestions following classical cinematic conventions. The formalization of these conventions in a computationally efficient and expressive model is a challenging task in order to select and propose the user with a relevant subset of viewpoints among millions of possibilities. Second, the ability to analyze data from real movies in order to formalize some elements of cinematographic style and genre. Third, the integration of motion-tracked cameras in the workflow. Motion- tracked cameras represent a great potential for cinematographic content creation. However given that tracking spaces are of limited size, there is a need to provide novel interaction metaphors to ease the process of content creation with tracked cameras. Finally we will gather feedback on our prototype by involving professionals (during dedicated workshops) and will perform user evaluations with students from cinema schools.

National scientific collaborations

Cavaletic

Participant : Franck Multon.

The Cavaletic collaborative project is leaded by University Bretagne Sud and also involves University Rennes2 (CREAD Lab.). It has been funded by the National IFCE (Institut Français du Cheval et de l'Equitation) in order to develop and evaluate technological assistance in horse riding learning, thanks to a user-centered approach. MimeTIC is involved in measuring expert and non-expert horse riders motions in standardized situations in order to develop a metrics to measure the performance of users. It will be used to develop a technological system embedded on users to evaluate his performance and provide him with real-time feedback to correct potential errors.

ADT

ManIP

Participants : Franck Multon, Ludovic Hoyet.

The ADT-MAN-IP aims at proposing a common production pipeline for both MimeTIC and Hybrid teams. This pipeline intends to facilitate the production of populated virtual reality environments.

The pipeline starts with the motion capture of an actor, using motion capture devices such as a Vicon (product of Oxford Metrics) system. To do so, we need to design new methods to automatically adapt all motion captures data to an internal skeleton that can be reused to retarget the motion to various types of skeletons and characters. The purpose is then to play this motion capture data on any type of virtual characters used in the demos, regardless their individual skeletons and morphology. The key point here is to make this process be as automatic as possible.

The second step in the pipeline is to design a high level scenario framework to describe a virtual scene and the possible user's interactions with this scene so that he/she can interact with the story directly.

In this ADT we also connect these two opposite parts into a unique framework that can be used by non-experts in computer animation to design new immersive experiments involving autonomous virtual humans. The resulting framework can consequently be used in the Immersia immersive room for various types of application.

Immerstar

Participants : Franck Multon, Georges Dumont.

The ADT-Immerstar is drivenby the SED and aims at developping new tools and facilities for the scientific community in order to develop demos and use the two immersive rooms in Rennes: immersia and immermove. The engineer will have to homogeneize the software modules and development facilities in each platform, help installing new upgrades and to develop collaborative applications between the two sites.