392253 Conversational Animation for Virtual Humans (S) (SoSe 2015)

Virtual humans are widely used in many research and commercial applications, be it as an assistant on the Ikea website, in (serious) games, or as assistants in the homes of the elderly. By allowing interaction in the form of a conversation, virtual humans provide human computer interfaces that are intuitive and pleasant to work with. Nonverbal social behavior plays a crucial role in communicating information in conversations.

In this course you will be working on designing and implementing algorithms that generate -in real time- conversational animations such as gestures, head nods and facial expressions. Techniques that can be explored include (but are not limited to) motion capture editing, procedural animation, corpus based machine learning.

The course will start with a few lectures introducing the available corpora and animation framework. This is followed by a (individual or group) project. Students are required to deliver a presentation of their planned project, a (short) project report and to give a live demonstration of the developed software.