From Eye-Balls to Ball-Games: Next-Gen Motion Capture for Science and Entertainment
Chris Bregler, NYU

Abstract
This talk will cover several research projects centered around the use of vision and motion capture for animation, recognition, and gaming. This includes human movements as diverse as subtle eye-blinks, lip-motions, spine-deformations, human walks and dances, politicians, base-ball pitchers, and the production of the largest motion capture game to date. The technical content of the talk focuses on the trade-off between data-driven models of human motion vs. analytically derived and perceptually driven models using dancers, animators, linguists, and other domain experts. This is demonstrated by sub-pixel tracking in Hollywood productions, reading the body-language of public figures, visualizing the pitches of NY Yankees Mariano Rivera, and the making of crowd mocap games in various cultures.