ANIMATION/ENTERTAINMENT

THE VIRTUAL DIRECTOR

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Description:

Virtual Director provides a user-friendly, virtual-reality method to control camera motion for instant playback or animation recording. The Virtual Director shown in VROOM is a camera motion-control application using the CAVE to control and play back users' input in real time. Stored camera- motion data can be used to control various computer-generated imagery cameras (e.g., Wavefront, AVS, Renderman, etc.). This demonstration also includes an astronomical simulation of colliding galaxies that has been fully rendered in batch mode with this kind of camera motion control in mind. The galactic data were simulated using a supercomputer and visualized with Wavefront.

Historically, controlling camera motion has been one of the most clumsy aspects of computer animation. When camera motion is recorded and played back using virtual reality, the control mechanism is much more user- friendly and natural for novice users than attempting camera control with traditional methods. Virtual reality facilitates the real-time interface for camera motion viewing, recording, and playback. This application is robust and can be applied to various 3D imaging settings as well as scientific datasets.

Acknowledgements:

We wish to thank Tom DeFanti, Richard Gerber, Susan Lamb, Jeffrey Marvin, Mike McNeill, Dan Sandin, Bayley Silleck, William Sherman, Kim Stevenson, and Eric Wesselak. CAVE virtual-reality work is supported in part by National Science Foundation grant IRI-9213822 and grant CDA-9303433, which includes support from the Advanced Research Projects Agency.

Collaborators:


Donna Cox
    National Center for Supercomputing Applications, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign


Robert Patterson

    National Center for Supercomputing Applications


Marcus Thiebaux

    Electronic Visualization Laboratory, University of Illinois at Chicago

Contact:

Marcus Thiebaux
    University of Illinois at Chicago
    Electronic Visualization Laboratory
    851 S. Morgan St., Room 1120
    Chicago, IL 60607-7053 USA
thiebaux@evl.eecs.uic.edu

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