Simulating Humans: Computer Graphics, Animation, and Control

People are all around us. They inhabit our home, workplace, entertainment, and environment. Their presence and actions are noted or ignored, enjoyed or disdained, analyzed or prescribed. The very ubiquitousness of other people in our lives poses a tantalizing challenge to the computational modeler: people are at once the most common object of interest and yet the most structurally complex. Their everyday movements are amazingly uid yet demanding to reproduce, with actions driven not just mechanically by muscles and bones but also cognitively by beliefs and intentions. Our motor systems manage to learn how to make us move without leaving us the burden or pleasure of knowing how we did it. Likewise we learn how to describe the actions and behaviors of others without consciously struggling with the processes of perception, recognition, and language.