The gathering of leading Empirical Software Engineering researchers at Dagstuhl provides a unique opportunity to capture the current challenges facing the field. Our gathering enables deep discussions that identify critical issues, discuss promising opportunities, and outline future directions. A typical framework for organizing ideas and plans from thought leaders is the definition of a roadma...

The MPEG-4 Face and Body Animation (FBA) specifications aims at standardizing an interchange format for specifying virtual face and body modeling and related animation parameters. The scene graph concept, the FBA nodes, semantics and representation of the animation parameters as well as compression and streaming capabilities are successively addressed. The compatibility between virtual characte...

The PLATUS simulation environment allows for a modular description of simulation models, clearly separating aspects of behavior, statistics and animation. Each component of a model in PLATUS has its own animation interface, that describes when and which messages will be sent to a corresponding animation module. The GENGED environment was originally developed for the visual definition of visual ...

In this paper, we present a representation for three-dimensional geometric animation sequences. Different from standard key-frame techniques, this approach is based on the determination of principal animation components and decouples the animation from the underlying geometry. The new representation supports progressive animation compression with spatial, as well as temporal, level-of-detail an...

This paper discusses outcomes from an experimental survey on the integration of Design Thinking (DT) and Creative Methods (CM) for animation education in Chinese universities. The was conducted 62 college students at two different universities, namely, Kunming University Yunnan Hunan Science Engineering Hunan. Two stages, pretest posttest experiments, were adopted completion survey. In understa...

A novel lip movement model related to speech rate is proposed in this paper. The model is constructed based on the research results on the viscoelasticity of skin-muscle tissue and the quantitative relationship between lip muscle force and speech rate. In order to show the validity of the model, we have applied it to our Chinese speech animation system. The experimental results show that our sy...

Machinima is digital visuals created with game engines that build real-time 3D CG (computer graphic) environment. Composition of scene and facial animation play important role in composition of Machinima’s videos. Character facial animation is frequently used in scene composition that mainly displays face and upper body of the character. Expressing character’s emotion is an important factor in ...

We propose a coupled hidden Markov model (CHMM) approach to video-realistic speech animation, which realizes realistic facial animations driven by speaker independent continuous speech. Different from hidden Markov model (HMM)-based animation approaches that use a singlestate chain, we use CHMMs to explicitly model the subtle characteristics of audio–visual speech, e.g., the asynchrony, tempora...

In recent years, visual models represented by graphs have become very popular in systems development, as the wide-spread use of UML and Petri nets proves. Visual modeling techniques provide an intuitive, yet precise way to model the structure and behavior of systems at their natural level of abstraction. Validating model behavior is one of the main aims of visual behavior modeling. To express t...