Research interests
I am interested in research related to computer animation, interactive virtual humans, motion capture, motion synthesis, affective animation, emotion and personality simulation.
Computer Animation
Animated characters are an important aspect of games and simulations. Often, these characters are animated using prerecorded example motion in a motion capture lab. Although this results in realistic motions, there are a lot of disadvantages to motion captured animation. For one, you need a lot of different motion clips. Also, editing these clips is not easy. And finally, when playing back a motion on a character, the environment is not taken into account, resulting in all kinds of weird behavior, such as collisions, floating above the ground, and so on. I am interested in new techniques to animate characters by combining motion captured examples with other techniques such as motion synthesis or physics-based motions. For more information about the research, please visit the PhD students websites.
Serious games
One of my research interests is serious gaming, especially for training and rehabilitation applications. I am a member of the GaLA network of excellence, which bring together researchers and businesses in this field. Furthermore, I am involved in several other research project related to serious games (see below). An interesting research challenge is how characters move around in these serious game environment. How do they interact with the environment, and how do we control these characters as players?
Motion in Games
Since 2008, I am involved in the organization of the Motion in Games conference. For more information about that conference, please visit the website.