Section: Other Grants and Activities

Mobility Grants

PHC "Alliance" Virtual Sports Training

Participants : Franck Multon [ contact ] , Ludovic Hoyet.

This PHC "Alliance" program aims at encouraging collaborations between our lab. and Taku Komura (Edinburgh Univ.). It consists in funding shorts stays of French researchers in Edinburgh Univ. This project deals with developing virtual humans who are able to react to complex dynamic situations such as playing in sports. The character should be able to react in real-time to interactions with a user while taking dynamics into account. This project is linked to another PHC "Alliance" project proposed in University Rennes 2 (M2S lab. specialized in sports science) and Queen's Univ. Belfast (psychology school specialized in the perception-action loop). The main goal is to initiate collaborations and exchanges in order to submit a European FP7 project based on using VR for training subjects to improve their performance in sports. In 2008, Ludovic Hoyet spent six months in Edinburgh and one week in december 2009.

JST-CNRS: Improving the VR experience

Participants : Stéphane Donikian [ contact ] , Anatole Lécuyer, Aurélien Van Langhenhove, Sébastien Hillaire, Léo Terziman.

This project is supported by the Strategic Japanese-French Cooperative Program on “Information and Communications Technology (ICT) including Computer Science” and funded both by JST in Japan and CNRS in France. The goal of the project is to take advantage of the french-japanese relationships that were initiated during the STIC France-Asian project in VR (2004-2006), by concretising the exchanges through collaborations around the improvement of immersion in Virtual Reality environments. We aim at enhancing the behavior, visualization, and interaction between entities or between the user and the entities evolving in these virtual worlds. At the end, the expected results are an improvement of the realism in immersive environment, in particular of expressiveness, intelligent behavior of entities, and interactive gestures to communicate intuitively with these entities.

S. Donikian, S. Hillaire, A. van Langhenhove attended the second workshop in Strasbourg in March 2009. L. Terziman and S. Hillaire have spent respectively a six month and one month visit at the Keio University to work in the Inami Lab.

PRC CNRS - Smart Motion Planning

Participants : Marc Christie [ contact ] , Fabrice Lamarche [ contact ] , Thomas Lopez.

This Cooperative Research Project is a collaboration with Prof. Tsai-Yen Li, head of the Intelligent Media Laboratory located in Taiwan. This project looks at exploring the integration of topological and semantic information in the planning of motions in virtual environments. Motion planning is a complex and critical problem that finds applications in a large range of research fields. Results from the field of robotics have long-time been projected onto planning issues in virtual spaces, and have been adapted to character motion planning (autonomous agents, crowed simulation) and camera path planning (object tracking, virtual visits, virtual cinematography), however only considering the problem at a geometric level. In this project, we propose to make a fundamental and qualitative step in motion planning for virtual environments by integrating topological and semantic information in the exploration of navigable search spaces. We propose to extract multi-level abstractions of the geometric representation, offering detection of application-specific patterns (e.g. bottlenecks, staircases, doorways), to further allow the extension of classical planning techniques towards qualitative reasoning. The dynamic aspects of targeted applications include the necessity to design locally and globally informed reactive techniques. Marc Christie and Fabrice Lamarche spent two weeks in Tawain in december 2009.