Katherine Gemperline
Individual Project: When animating virtual characters, motions are typically used multiple times for games and movies, and developers modify these motions, for example, concatenating and blending multiple of them together. To this end, distance metrics calculate the similarities or differences between pairs of animations. One commonly used distance metric is based on the Root Mean Square Error, using the rotations of the x, y, and z axes of each joint. However, while comparing two animations, viewers might perceive a large difference between the two animations while there is a low distance metric value and vice versa. In this paper, we are researching the correlation between distance metric values and viewer perception of animations to explore the strength of the correlation and the accuracy of distance metrics. We investigate how these motions are perceived to help develop more perceptually valid distance metrics in the future. Escape Room: I assisted a graduate student, Alex Adkins, on her research project that takes place in an escape room built in Unity. The exact experiment specifications have not been decided as there are still bugs in the code for the escape room that need to be fixed. Read Paper Here: