Research Directions of the Center
HMS exists to promote first quality research of international stature. Our mission may be broadly defined as the study of multi-modal communication with computers. As such it encompasses generation of and human interaction with visual images, video, sound, and touch. Dr. Badler, the Center's Director, has been actively involved in the national and international computer graphics community since 1975. The Center has produced over 60 Ph.D. students and numerous Masters' degrees. The research of the Center is well represented in the mainstream computer graphics literature.
HMS publications
The present major research foci of the HMS Center are:
• Parameterized Action Representation (PAR) for digital human embodied agent models
• Analyzing and simulating human movement communicative qualities
• Real-time gesture animation and collision avoidance
• Attention, eye, and head motion modeling
• Digital human modeling software tools
• Task acquisition and instruction presentation using augmented reality
• Archaeology and cultural heritage sites
• Evolutionary processes for creating natural environments
Current Research
USAF: UMCE-FM: Untethered Motion Capture Evaluation for Flightline Maintenance (N. Badler)
The purpose of this effort is to explore and evaluate the utility of novel motion capture technologies within the Air Force maintenance domain. A primary objective is to determine the potential of untethered motion capture capabilities for real-time human subject motion capture and performance data collection with full scale physical props. A resultant objective will be to evaluate data collected during maintenance task performance validation for the purpose of instruction generation, and maintenance training.
ARO MURI: SUBTLE: Situation Understanding Bot Through Language and Environment (M. Marcus, N. Badler)
For effective human-bot communication to be possible, we must move from robust sentence processing to robust utterance understanding. Our bots must be able to decode not only what sentence the speaker used, but also what the speaker's intentions were when he spoke. This task takes us far beyond a precise specification of the set of literal meanings of individual sentences in isolation. It pushes us well past current text processing methods. It demands that we achieve a robust and tractable computational understanding of both implicit and explicit linguistic meaning.
Improving the Realism of Agent Movement for High Density Crowd Simulation (N. Badler, N. Pelechano)
The simulation of realistic, large, dense crowds of autonomous agents is still a challenge for the computer graphics community. Typical approaches either look like particle simulations (where agents ‘vibrate’ back and forth) or are conservative in the range of motion possible (agents aren’t allowed to ‘push’ each other). Our HiDAC system (High Density Autonomous Crowds) focuses on the problem of simulating the local motion behaviors of crowds moving in a natural manner within dynamically changing virtual environments.
Past Research Topics
USAF: AVIS-MS: Advanced Visual and Instruction Systems for Maintenance Support
NASA: RIVET: Rapid Interactive Visualization for Extensible Training
NSF: American Sign Language Natural Language Generation and Machine Translation (final movie)
NSF: Synthesis and Analysis of Communicative Gesture
LMCO: Virtual Human Testbed
VIRTE: Virtual Technologies and Environments
ACUMEN: Amplifying Control and Understanding of Multiple ENtities
Where to Look? Automating Visual Attending Behaviors of Human Characters
NASA: Crew Task Simulation for Maintenance, Training, and Safety
Virtual Environments for Training
Technology for Maintenance Procedure Validation