Digital Humans: Automatic character animation

数字人是动画电视、电影制作和电脑游戏的关键组成部分。传统上，角色动画是由艺术家离线创作的。然而，交互式在线电脑游戏和社交虚拟现实（VR）和增强现实（AR）系统需要实时和动态生成的内容。自动动画角色在这些平台上提供了自然交流的感觉，带来了更身临其境的体验。当与自然语言处理和语音合成器相结合时，它们还可以作为数字助理或对话代理自主执行任务。从历史上看，该领域主要集中在数字人物的面部动画和语音。然而，语音的非语言成分（面部和身体手势）是语音理解和现实角色互动的关键。这个项目的主要目标是创造一个能够自然移动身体的数字化身，并对诸如说话（说、笑、咳嗽和听）和环境变化等刺激做出适当的反应。具体来说，它将涉及探索这些刺激和身体运动之间的关系。这将需要设计、捕获和分析人体运动数据集，并开发一个合适的计算模型来推断身体姿势以改变输入。

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.