Deformable Avatars

With the increasing success of Networked Virtual Environments, Games and Web 3D, there is a need for new techniques to permit the creation and animation of Virtual Humans. Users may be represented by realistic avatars that they can control, but also autonomous Virtual Humans agents can now inhabit these Virtual Worlds. Virtual Humans with their soft tissues, skin, muscles, organs and clothes are completely deformable. There are many methods to enable the representation and deformation of these structures. These methods may be geometric or physics-based. Presenting a selection of the latest research work addressing various aspects related to deformable avatars, this book covers complementary topics such as body modelling and animation, face modelling and animation, physics-based and free-form deformations, motion capture, avatars technologies and agents. This volume is comprised of the combined proceedings of the DEFORM'2000 and AVATARS'2000 workshops, which were sponsored by the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) and organized by IFIP Working Group 5.10. The workshops were held in Geneva and Lausanne, Switzerland in November/December 2000.