Virtual humans

Virtual humans (or digital humans) are simulations of human beings on computers. The research domain is concerned with their representation, movement and behavior. There is a wide range of applications: simulation, games, film and TV productions, human factors and ergonomic and usability studies in various industries (aerospace, automobile, machinery, furniture etc.), clothing industry, telecommunications (avatars), medicine, etc. These applications require different know-hows. A medical application might require an exact simulation of specific internal organs; film industry requires highest aesthetic standards, natural movements, and facial expressions; ergonomic studies require faithful body proportions for a particular population segment and realistic locomotion with constraints, etc. Studies also show that human-like appearance of virtual humans show higher message credibility than anime-like virtual humans in advertising context. The Virtual Humans field is a vast research domain comprising numerous research topics: Anatomy and geometry, dealing with creation of human shape in 3D graphics using 3D scanners, digitizers and software tools for geometry deformation and modeling. Hair and skin representation and rendering Skeletal animation, or animation of joint angles of the skeleton structure defining the articulated body and consisting of segments (representing limbs) and joints (representing degrees of freedom). Main methods of skeletal animation are parametric keyframe animation, direct and inverse kinematics (possibly with constraints), direct and inverse dynamics or other physically-based animation technique A very common way of obtaining the joint angles is through motion capture. There are also several methods to model motion from the data obtained by motion capture: motion graphs, models based on principal component analysis, machine learning, etc. Body surface animation and deformation or skinning, simulating deformation of visible body surface with respect to the movement of the underlying skeleton structure.