Automatic camera control meets emergency simulations: An application to aviation safety

Computer-based simulations of emergencies increasingly adopt 3D graphics to visualize results and thus generate complex dynamic 3D scenes with many potentially parallel events that a\u21b5ect large groups of virtual characters. To understand the portrayed scenario, a viewer could interactively control a flying camera or switch among a set of virtual cameras that have been previously placed at modeling time. The first solution imposes a cognitive load on the viewer that can distract him/her from the analysis task, and (s)he might miss events while moving the camera. The second solution requires additional work in the modeling phase, and even a very large number of cameras could fail to correctly frame events because of dynamic occlusions. More sophisticated automatic camera control methods could help, but the methods in the literature are designed for sequential dialogue-like events that involve at most two or three characters and therefore would not work. In this paper, we present a fully automated, real-time system that is able to monitor events in emergency simulations, select relevant events based on user-provided filtering rules, and control a virtual camera such that the events of interest are properly presented to the viewer. To illustrate how the system works in practice, we also describe the first application of automatic camera control to the domain of aviation safety

Accurately Measuring the Satisfaction of Visual Properties in Virtual Camera Control

International audienceAbstract. Declarative approaches to camera control model inputs as properties on the camera and then rely on constraint-based and/or optimization techniques to compute the camera parameters or paths that best satisfy those properties. To reach acceptable performances, such approaches often (if not always) compute properties satisfaction in an approximate way. Therefore, it is difficult to measure results in terms of accuracy, and also compare approaches that use different approxima- tions. In this paper, we propose a simple language which can be used to express most of the properties proposed in the literature and whose semantics provide a way to accurately measure their satisfaction. The language can be used for several purposes, for example to measure how accurate a specific approach is and to compare two distinct approaches in terms of accuracy

Thinking like a director: Film editing paterns for virtual cinematographic storytelling

International audienceThis paper introduces Film Editing Patterns (FEP), a language to formalize film editing practices and stylistic choices found in movies. FEP constructs are constraints, expressed over one or more shots from a movie sequence that characterize changes in cinematographic visual properties such as shot sizes, camera angles, or layout of actors on the screen. We present the vocabulary of the FEP language, introduce its usage in analyzing styles from annotated film data, and describe how it can support users in the creative design of film sequences in 3D. More specifically, (i) we define the FEP language, (ii) we present an application to craft filmic sequences from 3D animated scenes that uses FEPs as a high level mean to select cameras and perform cuts between cameras that follow best practices in cinema and (iii) we evaluate the benefits of FEPs by performing user experiments in which professional filmmakers and amateurs had to create cinematographic sequences. The evaluation suggests that users generally appreciate the idea of FEPs, and that it can effectively help novice and medium experienced users in crafting film sequences with little training

Virtual Reality Stores for 1-to-1 E-commerce

Virtual Reality (VR) interfaces to e-commerce sites have recently begun to appear on the Internet, promising to make the e-shopping experience more natural, attractive, and fun for buyers. Unfortunately, usability of these interfaces is a major and still unexplored issue. In this paper, we present the approach we are following to guarantee and increase the usability of VR stores, also providing two practical examples of the solutions we are studying. In particular, the last part of the paper is devoted to discuss in detail how our VR store can be extended to 1-to-1 e-commerce applications. Keywords E-Commerce, Virtual Reality, 3D, Adaptive Interfaces. INTRODUCTION One of the challenges of e-commerce is the design of web sites which effectively present products and are easy and pleasant to use for buyers. Studies of the usability of current e-commerce sites are beginning to appear (e.g., Dong, Martin, and Kieke, 1998), reporting major design problems. These result in buyers failing ..