Connelly Barnes will present his research seminar/general exam on Thursday October 16 at 10AM in Room 402. The members of his committee are: Adam Finkelstein (advisor), Perry Cook, and Tom Funkhouser. Everyone is invited to attend his talk and those faculty wishing to remain for the oral exam following are welcome to do so. His abstract and reading list follow below. ----------------------------------------- Video Puppetry: A Performative Interface for Cutout Animation Abstract We present a video-based interface that allows users of all skill levels to quickly create cutout-style animations by performing the character motions. The puppeteer first creates a cast of physical puppets using paper, markers and scissors. He then physically moves these puppets to tell a story. Using an inexpensive overhead camera our system tracks the motions of the puppets and renders them on a new background while removing the puppeteer's hands. Our system runs in real-time (at 30 fps) so that the puppeteer and the audience can immediately see the animation that is created. Our system also supports a variety of constraints and effects including articulated characters, multi-track animation, scene changes, camera controls, 21/2-D environments, shadows, and animation cycles. Users have evaluated our system both quantitatively and qualitatively: In tests of low-level dexterity, our system has similar accuracy to a mouse interface. For simple story telling, users prefer our system over either a mouse interface or traditional puppetry. We demonstrate that even first-time users, including an eleven-year-old, can use our system to quickly turn an original story idea into an animation. Book 3D Computer Graphics, 2nd Edition, Alan Watt Papers * Layered acting for character animation Dontcheva, M, Yngve, G, Popovic, Z. 2003. SIGGRAPH '03 * ARTag, a Fiducial Marker System Using Digital Techniques FIALA, M. 2005. Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, 2005. CVPR '05. * OBBTree: A Hierarchical Structure for Rapid Interference Detection GOTTSCHALK, S., LIN, M. C., AND MANOCHA, D. 1996. SIGGRAPH. * Closed-Form Solution of Absolute Orientation using Unit Quaternions HORN, B. K. P. 1986. Journal of Optical Society of America * As-rigid-as-possible shape manipulation Igarashi, T, Moscovich, T, Hughes, J. 2005. ACM Trans. Graph. (Proc. SIGGRAPH), 1134-1141. * Tangible bits: towards seamless interfaces between people, bits and atoms Ishii, H, Ullmer, B. 1997. Proc. SIGCHI * Dinosaur input device Knep, B, Hayes, C, Sayre, R, Williams, T. 1995. Proc. SIGCHI * Object recognition from local scale-invariant features Lowe, D. 1999. International Conference on Computer Vision, 1150-1157. * A Taxonomy of Mixed Reality Visual Displays MILGRAM, P., AND KISHINO, F. 1994. IEICE Transactions on Information and Systems * Motion doodles: an interface for sketching character motion Thorne, M, Burke, D, Van de Panne, M. 2004. SIGGRAPH '04. * Detection and tracking of point features Tomasi, C, Kanade, T. 1991. Technical Report CMU-CS-91-132