Reading the Transformations of an Urban Edge: From Liberty Era Palermo to the City of Today

To honour the battle of 27 May 1860, in 1910 the Palermo City Government decided to realise a commemorative monument. A position at the centre of a large circular plaza was of have afforded the monument a greater solemnity. The commission for the Monument was awarded to Ernesto Basile. In 1927 the City Government decided to dedicate the monument to the Fallen and asked Basile to complete the monument adding an architectural backdrop. The first version of the new project was a fence that enveloped the entire square and the ring road, interrupted only by entrances near the streets flowing into the square, and dividing it into four sectors. The final design instead called for the realisation of a semi-circular exedra of columns interrupted at the centre by a large gate that allows access to the square and to the back of the monument. The successive development of the city engulfed the square in the midst of tall and anonymous buildings realised, beginning in the 1960s, without any order of relations, stripping the surrounding fabric of its identity. Through the survey of the today‘s configuration, the analysis of Basile‘s original drawings and the representation of the modifications made over time, this text proposes an original reading of the configuration of Piazza Vittorio Veneto and the Monument to the Fallen, in relation to important moments in its history, from its design to the present day. The three-dimensional models reproduce the monument and its surroundings at the time of its construction in 1910, based on the first version for its expansion (unbuilt), with the addition of the exedra from 1930 and in its current condition. The redesign and extrapolation of different views of the digital models also provided original images of use to new readings of the perception of this space

Sketching-out virtual humans: From 2d storyboarding to immediate 3d character animation

Virtual beings are playing a remarkable role in today’s public entertainment, while ordinary users are still treated as audiences due to the lack of appropriate expertise, equipment, and computer skills. In this paper, we present a fast and intuitive storyboarding interface, which enables users to sketch-out 3D virtual humans, 2D/3D animations, and character intercommunication. We devised an intuitive “stick figurefleshing-outskin mapping” graphical animation pipeline, which realises the whole process of key framing, 3D pose reconstruction, virtual human modelling, motion path/timing control, and the final animation synthesis by almost pure 2D sketching. A “creative model-based method” is developed, which emulates a human perception process, to generate the 3D human bodies of variational sizes, shapes, and fat distributions. Meanwhile, our current system also supports the sketch-based crowd animation and the storyboarding of the 3D multiple character intercommunication. This system has been formally tested by various users on Tablet PC. After minimal training, even a beginner can create vivid virtual humans and animate them within minutes

Perception of Motion and Architectural Form: Computational Relationships between Optical Flow and Perspective

Perceptual geometry refers to the interdisciplinary research whose objectives focuses on study of geometry from the perspective of visual perception, and in turn, applies such geometric findings to the ecological study of vision. Perceptual geometry attempts to answer fundamental questions in perception of form and representation of space through synthesis of cognitive and biological theories of visual perception with geometric theories of the physical world. Perception of form, space and motion are among fundamental problems in vision science. In cognitive and computational models of human perception, the theories for modeling motion are treated separately from models for perception of form.Comment: 10 pages, 13 figures, submitted and accepted in DoCEIS'2012 Conference: http://www.uninova.pt/doceis/doceis12/home/home.ph

Freeform User Interfaces for Graphical Computing

報告番号: 甲15222 ; 学位授与年月日: 2000-03-29 ; 学位の種別: 課程博士 ; 学位の種類: 博士(工学) ; 学位記番号: 博工第4717号 ; 研究科・専攻: 工学系研究科情報工学専

Sketching-out virtual humans: A smart interface for human modelling and animation

In this paper, we present a fast and intuitive interface for sketching out 3D virtual humans and animation. The user draws stick figure key frames first and chooses one for “fleshing-out” with freehand body contours. The system automatically constructs a plausible 3D skin surface from the rendered figure, and maps it onto the posed stick figures to produce the 3D character animation. A “creative model-based method” is developed, which performs a human perception process to generate 3D human bodies of various body sizes, shapes and fat distributions. In this approach, an anatomical 3D generic model has been created with three distinct layers: skeleton, fat tissue, and skin. It can be transformed sequentially through rigid morphing, fatness morphing, and surface fitting to match the original 2D sketch. An auto-beautification function is also offered to regularise the 3D asymmetrical bodies from users’ imperfect figure sketches. Our current system delivers character animation in various forms, including articulated figure animation, 3D mesh model animation, 2D contour figure animation, and even 2D NPR animation with personalised drawing styles. The system has been formally tested by various users on Tablet PC. After minimal training, even a beginner can create vivid virtual humans and animate them within minutes