Daniel Thalmann – författare

Written by a team of current and former researchers at MIRALab, University of Geneva or VRlab, EPFL, this book is the definitive guide to the area.

Research into the methods and techniques used in simulating crowds has developed extensively within the last few years, particularly in the areas of video games and film. Despite recent impressive results when simulating and rendering thousands of individuals, many challenges still exist in this area.

The comparison of simulation with reality, the realistic appearance of virtual humans and their behavior, group structure and their motion, and collision avoidance are just some examples of these challenges. For most of the applications of crowds, it is now a requirement to have real-time simulations – which is an additional challenge, particularly when crowds are very large.

Crowd Simulation analyses these challenges in depth and suggests many possible solutions. Daniel Thalmann and Soraia Musse share their experiences and expertise in the application of:

·         Population modeling

·         Virtual human animation

·         Behavioral models for crowds

·         The connection between virtual and real crowds

·         Path planning and navigation

·         Visual attention models

·         Geometric and populated semantic environments

·         Crowd rendering

The second edition presents techniques and methods developed since the authors first covered the simulation of crowds in 2007. Crowd Simulation includes in-depth discussions on the techniques of path planning, including a new hybrid approach between navigation graphs and potential-based methods. The importance of gaze attention – individuals appearing conscious of their environment and of others – is introduced, and a free-of-collision method for crowds is also discussed.

Recent times have seen growing interest in crowd simulation, particularly in the commercial sector where it is used in the fields of security, defence, entertainment and the movie industry. This book focuses closely on methods and techniques for crowd simulation, filling the gap in the professional literature.

The topics covered in this comprehensive survey include Modelling of Populations; Virtual Human Animation; Behavioural Animation of Crowds; Crowd Rendering and Populated Environments.

The fruit of many years experience on the creation of synthetic worlds and virtual realities, this book is based on the considerable expertise of the authors, who share their knowledge of mastering the complexities behind the creation of Virtual Reality (VR) applications.

The first part of the book reviews the basic theoretical and practical concepts involved in the visual aspect of virtual environments. Part 2 provides more details on the components, structure and types of virtual worlds that can be created, including detailed explanations of the main modeling and animation techniques for virtual characters - one of the most important aspects in a virtual world. A review and discussion of the main types of VR system architectures defines the different alternatives for organizing and designing a VR application.

The final part covers the main principles of Virtual Reality hardware using a generic classification of interaction devices based on a human-centered approach (via the five human senses: vision, sound, touch, smell and taste). The book closes with an overview of successful VR systems and applications and gives a glimpse of what lies in the future.

This book was conceived as a guided tour and provides practical explanations of each step in the process of creating a Virtual Reality application. It can be used both as textbook for a Virtual Reality course, and as a reference for courses covering computer graphics, computer animation or human-computer interaction topics.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 14th International Symposium on Visual Computing, ISVC 2019, held in Lake Tahoe, NV, USA in October 2019.

The 100 papers presented in this double volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 163 submissions. The papers are organized into the following topical sections: Deep Learning I; Computer Graphics I; Segmentation/Recognition; Video Analysis and Event Recognition; Visualization; ST: Computational Vision, AI and Mathematical methods for Biomedical and Biological Image Analysis; Biometrics; Virtual Reality I; Applications I; ST: Vision for Remote Sensing and Infrastructure Inspection; Computer Graphics II; Applications II; Deep Learning II; Virtual Reality II; Object Recognition/Detection/Categorization; and Poster.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 14th International Symposium on Visual Computing, ISVC 2019, held in Lake Tahoe, NV, USA in October 2019.

The 100 papers presented in this double volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 163 submissions. The papers are organized into the following topical sections: Deep Learning I; Computer Graphics I; Segmentation/Recognition; Video Analysis and Event Recognition; Visualization; ST: Computational Vision, AI and Mathematical methods for Biomedical and Biological Image Analysis; Biometrics; Virtual Reality I; Applications I; ST: Vision for Remote Sensing and Infrastructure Inspection; Computer Graphics II; Applications II; Deep Learning II; Virtual Reality II; Object Recognition/Detection/Categorization; and Poster.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 37th Computer Graphics International Conference, CGI 2020, held in Geneva, Switzerland, in October 2020. The conference was held virtually.

The 43 full papers presented together with 3 short papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 189 submissions. The papers address topics such as: virtual reality; rendering and textures; augmented and mixed reality; video processing; image processing; fluid simulation and control; meshes and topology; visual simulation and aesthetics; human computer interaction; computer animation; geometric computing; robotics and vision; scientific visualization; and machine learning for graphics.

The 1 full paper and 13 short papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from a total of 86 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections of modelling, animation and simulation; virtual reality; image processing and computer vision.

This edited book is one of the first to describe how Autonomous Virtual Humans and Social Robots can interact with real people and be aware of the surrounding world using machine learning and AI. It includes:

·       Many algorithms related to the awareness of the surrounding world such as the recognition of objects, the interpretation of various sources of data provided by cameras, microphones, and wearable sensors

·       Deep Learning Methods to provide solutions to Visual Attention, Quality Perception, and Visual Material Recognition

·       How Face Recognition and Speech Synthesis will replace the traditional mouse and keyboard interfaces

·       Semantic modeling and rendering and shows how these domains play an important role in Virtual and Augmented   Reality Applications.

Intelligent Scene Modeling and Human-Computer Interaction explains how to understand the composition and build very complex scenes and emphasizes the semantic methods needed to have an intelligent interaction with them. It offers readers a unique opportunity to comprehend the rapid changes and continuous development in the fields of Intelligent Scene Modeling.   

The 44 full papers presented together with 9 short papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 131 submissions. The papers are organized in the following topics: computer animation; computer vision; geometric computing; human poses and gestures; image processing; medical imaging; physics-based simulation; rendering and textures; robotics and vision; visual analytics; VR/AR; and engage.