Walther-Franks, Benjamin
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Walther-Franks, Benjamin
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Walther-Franks, Benjamin
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Item type:Publication, Robots, Pancakes, and Computer Games: Designing Serious Games for Robot Imitation LearningAutonomous manipulation robots can be valuable aids as interactive agents in the home, yet it has proven extremely difficult to program their behavior. Imitation learning uses data on human demonstrations to build behavioral models for robots. In order to cover a wide range of action strategies, data from many individuals is needed. Acquiring such large amounts of data can be a challenge. Tools for data capturing in this domain must thus implement a good user experience. We propose to use human computation games in order to gather data on human manual behavior. We demonstrate the idea with a strategy game that is operated via a natural user interface. A comparison between using the game for action execution and demonstrating actions in a virtual environment shows that people interact longer and have a better experience when playing the game.conference paper101 134 - Some of the metrics are blocked by yourconsent settings
Item type:Publication, Direct Animation Interfaces : an Interaction Approach to Computer Animation(2014-07-31); ; ; Creativity tools for digital media have been largely democratised, offering a range from beginner to expert tools. Yet computer animation, the art of instilling life into believable characters and fantastic worlds, is still a highly sophisticated process restricted to the spheres of expert users. This is largely due to the methods employed: in keyframe animation dynamics are indirectly specified over abstract descriptions, while performance animation suffers from inflexibility due to a high technological overhead. The reverse trend in human-computer interaction to make interfaces more direct, intuitive, and natural to use has so far hardly touched the animation world: decades of interaction research have scarcely been linked to research and development of animation techniques. The hypothesis of this work is that an interaction approach to computer animation can inform the design and development of novel animation techniques. Three goals are formulated to illustrate the validity of this thesis. Computer animation methods and interfaces must be embedded in an interaction context. The insights this brings for designing next generation animation tools must be examined and formalised. The practical consequences for the development of motion creation and editing tools must be demonstrated with prototypes that are more direct, efficient, easy-to-learn, and flexible to use. The foundation of the procedure is a conceptual framework in the form of a comprehensive discussion of the state of the art, a design space of interfaces for time-based visual media, and a taxonomy for mappings between user and medium space-time. Based on this, an interaction-centred analysis of computer animation culminates in the concept of direct animation interfaces and guidelines for their design. These guidelines are tested in two point designs for direct input devices. The design, implementation and test of a surface-based performance animation tool takes a system approach, addressing interaction design issues as well as challenges in extending current software architectures to support novel forms of animation control. The second, a performance timing technique, shows how concepts from video browsing can be applied to motion editing for more direct and efficient animation timing.doctoral thesis431 141