Section: Highlights of the Year

Highlights of the Year

This year, we feature four of the team's research results as specific highlights, in particular due to their high publication impacts.

Our work entitled “Validation of an ergonomic assessment method using Kinect data in real workplace conditions“ ([15] by Pierre Plantard, Hubert PH Shum, Anne-Sophie Le Pierres and Franck Multon) has been accepted in the journal Applied Ergonomics. This publication is very important for future works in ergonomics as it demonstrates the relevance of the Kinect data correction for in-site (on a real workstation in factories) in an ergonomic purpose.

A State of the art paper, “Muscle-Based Control For Character Animation” has been published in Computer Graphics Forum ([6] by Ana Lucia Cruz Ruiz, Charles Pontonnier, Nicolas Pronost and Georges Dumont). It presents an organized review of over a decade of research in muscle-based control for character animation, its fundamental concepts and future directions for development. The core of this review contains a classification of control methods, tables summarizing their key aspects, and popular neuromuscular functions used within these controllers.

Our work entitled “Perceptual Effect of Shoulder Motions on Crowd Animations” ([11] by Ludovic Hoyet, Anne-Hélène Olivier, Richard Kulpa and Julien Pettré ) has been accepted and presented in SIGGRAPH 2016, the premier and most selective computer graphics scientific event, and published in ACM Transaction on Graphics. It explores how local interactions between walkers are perceived by users when secondary shoulder motions are displayed, and demonstrates the benefits of such secondary animations in large-scale crowd scenarios.

Two papers exploring the effects of the avatar's representation on users' sense of “virtual embodiment” (i.e., the extent to which we accept an avatar to be our representation in the virtual environment) were published in Frontiers in Robotics and AI [10] and in IEEE VR [19], resulting from a collaboration between Ludovic Hoyet (MimeTIC), and Ferran Argelaguet and Anatole Lécuyer (Hybrid). This work paves the way to further collaborations on understanding how we accept virtual characters as our own representation in virtual environments.

Awards

This year, the ANR Entracte leaded by CNRS/LAAS received the best price for ANR Project in November 2016 in Paris (“Grand prix du Numérique des 10ans de l'ANR”, link).

The ANR Jeune Chercheur project Cinecitta, led by Marc Christie, has also been awarded one of the 10 “iconic” projects (projets emblématiques) for the 10 years of the ANR, and will be presented at the 10 years celebration of the ANR in December 2016.