Week 1 // June 02 - June 08
On Tuesday, June 3rd, I was surprised to see Pittsburgh greeting me with a soft drizzle, which later turned into an icky cold shower. To quote one of my lab-mates: "Pittsburgh is insistently underlying the fact that it is not Hawai'i." This miserable weather absolutely doesn't justify an 11-hour overnight trip from HI to PA... However, if this summer will be anything like last year, everything will be well worth it!
 |
| The wall decorated with posters and the door to the Graphics Lab |
I was very happy that I got a chance to meet with Jessica that day. She was supposed to leave for California two hours after I got to campus but ended up moving her flight to the next day instead. I stopped by her office and we briefly discussed what I need to do in order to get settled (keys, ID badge, PC station, etc.). We also talked about the project for the summer and set up a meeting for tomorrow to discuss the plan of action. Although we are not quite sure what the project I will be working on, Jessica would like me to team up with Laurel Bancroft who works in the motion capture lab (mocap lab). According to Jessica, Laurel is very "agile in Maya" and I am looking forward to working with her.
It was very good to meet people who I knew from last summer. They warmly greeted me and welcomed back. I spent most of the day in the graphics and motion capture labs catching up on what I've missed in the past 9 months. I was very excited to get hard copies of the two papers that were recently published:
- the first one was written by Takaaki Shiratori, the post-doctoral student from Japan, who I have been working with last summer on the Wii-controllers' project. The paper showed how his approach allowed a user to control an avatar on a screen using the Wii-controllers.
- the second paper was written by Ronit Slyper, who took our Wii-volutionizing idea of using accelerometers to extract motion capture data but instead of the Wiimotes she used actual accelerometers, which she sew into a shirt. Click here to visit the project page.
The day was concluded with the usual Tuesday's graphics group meeting where Stefan Gärtner (Gaertner), a visiting researcher from the University of Karlsruhe in Germany, presented his past work on a system called VooDoo.
 |
| This is what I'll be working with |
The next day (Wednesday, June 4) I had a meeting with Laurel at 4:30 in the morning. Of course, Laurel thought it was at 10:30 a.m. but, my body felt otherwise :-P During my yesterday's meeting with Jessica, she suggested that Laurel and I agree on an area from the proposal that Jessica sent us. This way we could work on something together and, hopefully, converge on a solution faster. Today Laurel and I discussed the two categories of the proposal that I selected for the project. Unfortunately, I cannot post the proposal here since its contents are classified. Let's just say for now that we are going to be using motion capture data to create animations in Maya. During the mocap meeting, Jessica approved of our choice and we outlined the preliminary steps needed to get us started.
Following Jessica's advice, I met with Stefan (who gave a presentation at the Graphics meeting) on Thursday (June 5). I asked him about his project and was really amazed by how much work is required for his Master's thesis. He sent me some of the papers he was using, which were primarily on humanoid motion capture (since he is working with a humanoid robot). We might use some of the approaches and apply them to our 3-D characters.
To get a better idea of what kind of work we need to be doing, we organized a meeting with Jim Duesing on Friday (June 6). Jim, who is an art professor at Carnegie Mellon, co-wrote the proposal with Jessica. It was interesting to get his insight on our future work. His perspective and direction differed from what Jessica had in mind. He gave us a broader vision of the proposal and gave some suggestions on what he would like to see if we were to do it the way he visualizes it (a simple tool with a much finer control over the animation process and a final animation with, preferably, a humorous scenario, showing the results of our efforts).
It seems like we would need to hold a few more brainstorming sessions before we get settled on a final idea for the project.
| Next Week ==>> |