UCLA Computer Graphics & Vision Laboratory
Projects

	Biomechanical Modeling and Control of the Human Body Sung-Hee Lee, Eftychios Sifakis, Jinho Park, Demetri Terzopoulos We develop a comprehensive biomechanical model of the human body, confronting the combined challenge of modeling and controlling more or less all of the relevant articular bones and muscles, as well as simulating the physics-based deformation of the soft tissues.
	Embedded Sketch Recognition Gabriele Nataneli We devised a sketch recognition pipeline that is very flexible and comes with minimal computation requirements. We implemented this framework on a variety of devices including the Nintendo DS and the iPhone.
	Egocentric Affordance Fields in Pedestrian Steering Mubbasir Kapadia, Shawn Singh, Billy Hewlett We present a system for local path-planning and steering that can be easily extended to perform high level group behaviors. Our framework is based on the concept of affordances  the possible ways an agent can interact with its environment. Each agent perceives the environment through a set of fields that are represented in the agent s local space, termed as Egocentric Perception Fields. Using our framework, we demonstrate autonomous virtual pedestrians that perform steering and path planning in unknown environments along with the emergence of high level responses to never seen before situations.
	AI Fighter Billy Hewlett In this fast paced fighting game, you and your human opponent compete with by fighting each other's students. Each student AI, in turn, learns how to fight by observing its human teacher fight her opponent's student. The winner is the player who can teach their student to beat the other player first. Read about and download this PC game here
	Partially Precomputed A* Billy Hewlett It is computationally expensive to perform A* on a large number of agents in real time applications. Our work is an amoritized search algorithm which can outperform A* for large numbers of agents searching the same graph.
	Controller Synthesis for Physically Based Character Animation Brian Allen The goal of this project is to develop a machine learning system to automatically synthesize real-time actuator controllers for physically simulated characters. Such a system should ideally rely on only the mechanical structure of the character and a high-level description of the desired behavior. Bipedal locomotion for human-scale characters has been used to validate the approach.
	Automatic Splicing for Hand and Body Animations Anna Majkowska We propose a solution to a new problem in animation research: how to use human motion capture data to create character motion with detailed hand gesticulation without the need for the simultaneous capture of hands and the full body.
	Sketch Based Facial Animation Gabriele Nataneli We are developing a sketch-based interface for driving facial animation. Hand-drawn sketches are the most natural medium for artists and children to express their visions; our goal is to conceal the complexity of a facial animation system through an interface which is both powerful and enjoyable to use.

	Character Skinning Albert Chu We are developing a character skinning interface module for the D.A.N.C.E software system.
	The Virtual Stuntman Ari Shapiro We are developing a multi-tasking, autonomous virtual stuntman using a combination of physics-based and kinematic techniques.
	Speech To Facial Animation Yong Cao We are developing a system for speech-to-facial animation in collaboration with Dr. Fred Pighin at ICT/USC.
	Constrained Simulation of Particle Systems and Rigid Bodies Lucio Flores We are implementing and modifying existing techniques for the physics-based simulation of particle and rigid bodies. Eventually the project will develop a simulation engine for articulated bodies. We are investigating methods based on cartesian and reduced coordinate systems.
	Real Time Cloth Simulation Ray Huang, Alan Gasperini We are working on real-time cloth simulation based on a technique presented on the paper "Advanced Character Physics" by Jakobsen and Thomas.