Subject: Computer Animation

[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

[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

[TAKEN] How does it feel if your avatar in Virtual Reality is wearing realistic clothing?

Rachel McDonnell (email | all projects)

[FYP or MSc Level] This project will investigate clothing a virtual character using existing cloth plugins (e.g. uDraper or Marvelous Designer), and applying them to photorealistic Metahuman characters in UE5. Cloth simulation will then be tested using Chaos cloth or other, and student will create an embodiment system, where the user can embody a character … Read more

[Unavailable] Cartoon Pose Estimation

Rachel McDonnell (email | all projects)

[MSc Level] We will collaborate with award-winning animation studio Cartoon Saloon to investigate animated character body part recognition. This project aims to search through cartoon scenes in order to identify character body parts. This task is more difficult than typical human pose-estimation as cartoon characters are often drawn to defy the laws of physics. Knowledge … Read more

[Unavailable] Enfacement for Deep Fakes

Rachel McDonnell (email | all projects)

CitizenMetaOne Youtuber live capture setup [FYP or MSc level] Become a virtual youtuber, and create your own live Metahuman system setup, using HTC Vive controllers for tracking the hands and a webcam for capturing the face. This project will use pre-existing animation plugins in Unreal Engine as a starting point (Faceware for the facial capture, … Read more

[Unavailable] Neural Network Cloth Simulation

Rachel McDonnell (email | all projects)

[MSc] In this project, you will first generate a database of cloth simulation for a single character performing a large range of motions, from a mocap database. You will use a commercial cloth simulation software to create the deformations (e.g., Houdini, Maya, UE4 cloth etc.). Then, the idea is to create a neural network that … Read more