Section: New Results

Applications covered by this year's results

The above sections presented our research in terms of fundamental tools, models and algorithms. A complementary point of view is to describe it in terms of application domains. The following sections describe our contribution to each of these domains, with reference to the tools we relied on if they were already presented above.

Interactive modeling systems

Participants : Grégoire Aujay, Georges-Pierre Bonneau, Marie-Paule Cani, Paul Kry, Jamie Wither.

Several of the tools we are developing are devoted to a new generation of interactive modeling systems:

• The multiresolution geometric modeling with constraints tool presented in Section  6.1.1 has been used for interactive modeling.

• The real-time physically-based model for virtual clay presented in Section  6.1.2 is dedicated to a sculpting system as close as possible to interaction with real clay.

• The sketching tools presented in Section  6.1.3 have been used to model garments and hair, and are being extended to model more general free form shapes. They are used in the industrial contract with Axiatec (see Section  7.3 ).

Synthesis of natural scenes

Participants : Antoine Bouthors, Eric Bruneton, Marie-Paule Cani, Mathieu Coquerelle, Philippe Decaudin, Fabrice Neyret, Qizhi Yu.

Many of the diverse fundamental tools we are developing (see Sections 6.2.4 , 6.2.5 , 6.3.3 , 6.3.4 and 6.3.5 ) are contributing to the long term, general goal of modeling and animating natural scenes. They can be combined to allow the large scale specification, efficient rendering and animation of landscapes (rivers and cloudy sky, etc). The synthesis of complete natural sceneries is one of the aims of the Natsim project (see Section  8.2.2 ).

Medical applications

Participants : Marie-Paule Cani, François Faure, Frank Hetroy, Matthieu Nesme, Olivier Palombi, Laks Raghupathi.

Some of our work on geometric modeling and physically-based animation has been successfully applied to the medical domain:

Our tools for efficient physically-based simulation, and in particular our new contributions to collision detection and response (see Section  6.2.1 ), is being used in a new European medical project called Odysseus (see Section  8.1.2 ).

Furthermore, Mathieu Nesme's PhD research (see Section  6.2.2 ), which is co-advised by Yohan Payam of laboratory TIMC, concentrates on the development of improved models for human tissue simulation for surgical simulations.

Animation of virtual creatures

Participants : Florence Bertails, Marie-Paule Cani, Christine Depraz, François Faure, Laurent Favreau, Lionel Reveret.

Several of our new models and algorithms contribute to the animation of virtual creatures. This includes our work on motion capture from video (Section  6.2.6 ); the physically-based animation tools (Sections  6.2.1 and  6.2.2 ) that we are currently applying to the simulation of virtual garments; and our adaptive animation algorithm for efficiently computing hair motion (see 6.2.3 ).

A first work towards the perceptive evaluation of animation has been achieved in collaboration with the dept. of Psychology of the U. of Geneva for facial animation. A study has been made to evaluate what different parts of the brain are activated when a picture of an expressive face is showed to a subject, with gaze pointing towards the subject or not. It has been necessary to adapt a 3D model to standard photographs of expressive faces, so that the eye orientation on the photographs could be accurately controlled in a realistic manner.