"This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5)."
The objective of this project is to build a state-of-the-art Human Motion Acquisition Facility capable of capturing human motion data using an array of synchronized multiple sensors. It includes hardware and software necessary to capture simultaneously multi-modal aspects of human performance including human movement, ground reaction forces, video data, muscle activation patterns, heart rate, temperature, eye movement, etc. Importantly, all the data is synchronized with each other.
The facility enables researchers to explore new frontiers in human motion synthesis. In particular, the captured data is used to study novel compact representations of human motions and to develop new algorithms to efficiently synthesize detailed realistic motions of a single character and crowds. The data is also used to build, animate and populate virtual worlds. The facility also greatly benefits existing computer graphics degree programs at UPenn (Ph.D, Masters, Undergraduate, and summer high school students). The use of the facility is an integral part of the curriculum in these programs.
Currently, there are no extensive, publicly available, high quality databases of human motion data synchronized with data from other sensors. All the data we obtain in this project will be made publicly available. The facility will therefore enable new research ranging from human motion synthesis in computer animation to medical studies of people with disabilities to researching novel simulators. As a result, it will foster inter-disciplinary research. The facility will also make computer graphics programs at UPenn even more exciting and will help in attracting more women to computer science.
