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Teleoperated avatar robots allow people to transport their manipulation skills to environments that may be difficult or dangerous to work in. Current systems are able to give operators direct control of many components of the robot to…
Faithful real-time facial animation is essential for avatar-mediated telepresence in Virtual Reality (VR). To emulate authentic communication, avatar animation needs to be efficient and accurate: able to capture both extreme and subtle…
Robots are increasingly expected to execute open ended natural language requests in human environments, which demands reliable long horizon execution under partial observability. This is especially challenging for humanoids because…
Learning visual representations from observing actions to benefit robot visuo-motor policy generation is a promising direction that closely resembles human cognitive function and perception. Motivated by this, and further inspired by…
A vital task of the wider digital human effort is the creation of realistic garments on digital avatars, both in the form of characteristic fold patterns and wrinkles in static frames as well as richness of garment dynamics under avatars'…
Cooperative motion planning is still a challenging task for robots. Recently, Value Iteration Networks (VINs) were proposed to model motion planning tasks as Neural Networks. In this work, we extend VINs to solve cooperative planning tasks…
Movement is how people interact with and affect their environment. For realistic character animation, it is necessary to synthesize such interactions between virtual characters and their surroundings. Despite recent progress in character…
Expression cloning plays an important role in facial expression synthesis. In this paper, a novel algorithm is proposed for facial expression cloning. The proposed algorithm first introduces a new elastic model to balance the global and…
Although telepresence assistive robots have made significant progress, they still lack the sense of realism and physical presence of the remote operator. This results in a lack of trust and adoption of such robots. In this paper, we…
Drawing tools for Virtual Reality (VR) enable users to model 3D designs from within the virtual environment itself. These tools employ sketching and sculpting techniques known from desktop-based interfaces and apply them to hand-based…
Animating human-scene interactions such as pick-and-place tasks in cluttered, complex layouts is a challenging task, with objects of a wide variation of geometries and articulation under scenarios with various obstacles. The main difficulty…
Virtual Reality (VR) has rapidly become a mainstream platform for gaming and interactive experiences, yet ensuring the quality, safety, and appropriateness of VR content remains a pressing challenge. Traditional human-based quality…
Task specification for robotic manipulation in open-world environments is challenging, requiring flexible and adaptive objectives that align with human intentions and can evolve through iterative feedback. We introduce Iterative Keypoint…
Virtual character animation control is a problem for which Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a viable approach. While current work have applied RL effectively to portray physics-based skills, social behaviours are challenging to design reward…
Sequentially interacting with articulated objects is crucial for a mobile manipulator to operate effectively in everyday environments. To enable long-horizon tasks involving articulated objects, this study explores building scene-level…
We propose a novel neural rendering pipeline, Hybrid Volumetric-Textural Rendering (HVTR), which synthesizes virtual human avatars from arbitrary poses efficiently and at high quality. First, we learn to encode articulated human motions on…
Interactive digital stories provide a sense of flexibility and freedom to players by allowing them to make choices at key junctions. These choices advance the narrative and determine, to some degree, how the story evolves for that player.…
Constructing and animating humans is an important component for building virtual worlds in a wide variety of applications such as virtual reality or robotics testing in simulation. As there are exponentially many variations of humans with…
A common vision from science fiction is that robots will one day inhabit our physical spaces, sense the world as we do, assist our physical labours, and communicate with us through natural language. Here we study how to design artificial…
In this paper, we introduce a concept called ''virtual co-embodiment'', which enables a user to share their virtual avatar with another entity (e.g., another user, robot, or autonomous agent). We describe a proof-of-concept in which two…