Virtual environments are increasingly present in our lives, with a large number of potential applications. An indispensable component of many of these applications are virtual humans. From training for evacuation through to background scenes for a historical drama, virtual characters provide important context and constraints to the user; they can significantly improve the plausibility of the environment leading to a more realistic response, and ultimately, better understanding of the situation or better entertainment. Increasing processing power and the latest machine learning developments, enable designers and programmers to add multitudes of virtual characters in real-time applications. As the real-time rendering of the characters is becoming more and more realistic, there is a considerable gap between the rendering appearance and their simulated behavior. In this presentation we will look at some recent work on data-driven character simulation and animation covering both the simulation of virtual crowds and ambient life as well as the stylistic animation of individual characters.

Yiorgos L. Chrysanthou is the Research Director of the Centre on Interactive Media, Smart Systems and emerging Technologies – CYENS Centre of Excellence. He is also a Professor at the Computer Science Department of the University of Cyprus. Yiorgos was educated in the UK (BSc and PhD from Queen Mary College, University of London) and worked for several years as a research fellow and a lecturer at University College London. He has published over 80 papers in journals and international conferences on computer graphics and virtual reality and is a co-author of the book “Computer Graphics and Virtual Environments: From Realism to Real-Time”, (Addison-Wesley 2001+ China Machine Press 2004). Yiorgos serves as an associate editor for the Journals Computer Graphics Forum and Computers and Graphics, and review editor for Frontiers in Robotics and AI (Specialty Section Virtual Environments). He served as the local or overall coordinator of over 25 research projects, related his research interests, that lie in the general area of 3D Computer Graphics, recently focusing more on the development of algorithms for real-time AR and VR rendering, reconstruction of urban environments and computer animation.