Digital Humans: Automatic character animation

Digital humans are a key component of animated television and film productions, and computer games. Traditionally, character animation is created offline by artists. However, interactive online computer gaming, and social virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) systems demand real-time and dynamically generated content. Automatically animated characters provide the feeling of natural communication on these platforms, leading to a more immersive experience. When combined with natural language processing and speech synthesisers, they can also perform autonomously as digital assistants or conversational agents.

Historically, the field has been predominantly focused on animating the faces of digital characters along with speech. However, the non-verbal components of speech (face and body gesture) are key to both speech comprehension and for realistic character interaction. The main goal of the proposed project is to create a digital avatar that moves its body naturally and reacts appropriately to stimuli such as speech (speaking, laughing, coughing and listening), and changes in environment. Specifically, it will involve exploring the relationship between such stimuli and body motion. It will require the design, capture and analysis of a human motion dataset and the development of a suitable computational model for inferring body pose for changing inputs.