April 2003

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April 15, 2003:

• Demetri Terzopoulos (MRL, NYU) on "D-NURBS," 1pm.
• Wei Shao (MRL, NYU) on "Simulating Autonomous Pedestrian Agents In A Virtual World," noon.

In this talk, I will briefly introduce the techniques we used in simulating autonomous human agents, especially pedestrians, in a virtual world. Here by autonomous, we mean that each of those virtual humans has his/her own control of himself/herself. In their virtual world, they observe the situation around them, make decisions and behave accordingly. The talk will cover a world database model and a pyramid human model. A collection of animation clips produced by our current simulation system will be shown and future work will be discussed. As I will not go into the deep of the algorithms, this talk shall be very friendly to everybody.

Free-form geometric primitives such as NURBS are traditionally shaped by manipulating their numerous degrees of freedom: control points and weights. This indirect shape manipulation process is an oftentimes clumsy and laborious task. I will present "Dynamic NURBS", or D-NURBS, a physics-based generalization of industry-standard geometric NURBS which supports direct interactive sculpting. On top of the NURBS geometric substrate, D-NURBS incorporate physical quantities such as force, mass, and deformation energy. Dynamic behavior results from the numerical integration of nonlinear differential equations of motion that automatically evolve the geometric degrees of freedom to produce natural shape variation in response to applied forces and constraints.

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Last Updated: April 14, 2003