Rachel McDonnell

[TAKEN] PsyFace: Mapping Personality Traits to Procedural Facial Features in Unreal Engine

Rachel McDonnell (email | all projects)

    This project will develop a procedural facial feature adjustment system for Unreal Engine MetaHumans that dynamically modifies key facial characteristics based on psychological associations between facial traits and personality impressions—for example, enlarging eyes to convey honesty or adjusting jawline to suggest dominance. The system will map established psychological findings about how facial features … Read more

[TAKEN] AI Clothing Variety for Virtual Crowds

Rachel McDonnell (email | all projects)

This project aims to enhance the visual diversity and realism of crowds in real-time virtual environments by combining AI-driven texture generation for clothing with procedural variation techniques applied to a limited set of template MetaHumans in Unreal Engine. By leveraging state-of-the-art AI models to generate diverse, high-quality clothing textures dynamically, the project will create varied … Read more

[TAKEN] Exploring Avatar Customization and User Engagement in Virtual Educational Environments

Rachel McDonnell (email | all projects)

This project will explore how users select and customize avatars within educational virtual environments and how these choices affect engagement and identification with the learning experience. The student will review existing avatar customization systems, focusing on how well they support user identity expression and ease of use in educational contexts. Using a prototype avatar customization … Read more

[Unavailable] Gaze and Navigation: User Responses to Mutual and Averted Gaze in Virtual Crowds

Rachel McDonnell (email | all projects)

This project will investigate how two core gaze behaviors, mutual gaze and gaze cueing, influence user behavior and attention in dynamic virtual environments. In real-world interactions, direct eye contact increases social presence and engagement, while observing another person’s gaze direction can automatically shift our own attention. Using immersive virtual reality, this study will simulate a … Read more

[TAKEN] Crying System for Virtual Humans

Rachel McDonnell (email | all projects)

[FYP] In this project, you will improve the realism of emotion on Metahumans in Unreal Engine by developing a realistic tear system, where tears are affected by gravity, and smudge in contact with make-up for added realism. Also part of the project will be motion capturing crying animations, and evaluating the resulting emotion with and … Read more

[Unavailable] Cartoon pose perception using eye-tracking

Rachel McDonnell (email | all projects)

[MSc Level] We will collaborate with award-winning animation studio Cartoon Saloon to investigate perception of pose for stylized cartoon characters, such as those used in their films. Cartoon characters are often drawn to defy the laws of physics, and there is little known about perception of these characters – what makes a cartoon pose similar … Read more

[Unavailable] Cinematic Lighting in VR: Enhancing Emotional Storytelling Through Real-Time Illumination

Rachel McDonnell (email | all projects)

[FYP or MSc Level] This project will explore how lighting design, informed by cinematography and psychological theories, can be used to enhance emotional expressivity in characters and user immersion within a real-time VR open-world environment. The student will research emotional lighting techniques from film and psychology—such as color theory, contrast, and lighting direction—and apply them … Read more

[Unavailable] Deep Fake Enfacement Experiment

Rachel McDonnell (email | all projects)

  [MSc Level] This project will involve creating a real-time enfacment system from the state of the art deep-fake networks, and conducting perceptual experiments to identify if participants have ownership of their new face, and if properties of the source-actor (e.g., age, gender, etc.) can be perceived, even though the generated video is a photorealistic … Read more

[Unavailable] Non-verbal behaviours for speaking virtual avatars

Rachel McDonnell (email | all projects)

[MSc level] Virtual assistants are becoming commonplace but the ability for them to gesture naturally and appropriately is still a huge research challenge (see image which shows a typical assistant displayed from the neck up, without gesturing arms and hands). In this project, you will develop a method to automatically learn structure from speech sequences … Read more