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Realism | Animation

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Introduction to Virtual Reality

University of London

4.7 (318 ratings) | 10K Students Enrolled

Course 1 of 5 in the Virtual Reality Specialization

This course will introduce you to Virtual Reality (VR). The course will teach you everything from the basics of VR- the hardware and the history of VR- to different applications of VR, the psychology of Virtual Reality, and the challenges of the medium. The course is designed for people who are new to VR as a medium. You may have experienced some virtual reality before, and may have some hardware- but this course is suitable to individuals who have never experienced VR and those who do not have much hardware- we will explain Mobile VR as well as devices such as the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive. Introduction to Virtual Reality is the first course in the Virtual Reality Specialisation. A learner with no previous experience in Virtual Reality and/or game programming will be able to evaluate existing VR applications, and design, test, and implement their own VR experiences/games using Unity by the end of the specialisation.

Reviews

4.7 (318 ratings)

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IC

Jun 15, 2018

Being a non-techie, I find this course quite easy to understand. The required readings are academic papers and I took some time to understand them but it is good quality readings.

CS

Dec 18, 2017

This course was very informative. I also found it challenging, which is a good thing. I was introduced to aspects of VR that had not considered, such as the psychological aspects.

From the lesson

Challenges in Virtual Reality

Introduction to Week 41:38

Realism | Graphics6:32

Realism | Animation4:01

Meeting Other People3:28

Haptic Feedback2:45

Taught By

Dr Sylvia Xueni Pan
Lecturer, Department of Computing
Dr Marco Gillies
Senior Lecturer

Transcript

[MUSIC]

In this video, we're going to discuss challenges of creating realistic and

believable animations in VR.

This is a nice looking computer-generated environment.

But it would not feel so real if everything just stayed still.

You would expect to see the leaves on the tree moving because of wind,

the birds on the house flying, and the sun either setting or rising.

So it would get darker or brighter soon.

None of this is too difficult to animate.

This image, on the other hand, would actually be quite hard to animate,

the main problem being the cape he's wearing.

In order to get a cape looking anywhere close to a real cape,

there needs to be a lot of programming and computation.

The good news is that most game engines nowadays come with a built-in

physics engine that takes care of physical simulations of this kind,

so you can just play with the parameters until you are happy with the effect.

The physics engine will animate the clothes automatically in a optimized way.

Another powerful animation tool that often comes as part of a game engine is called

a particle system.

It often used to generate effects, such as smoke, fire, and snow.

However, the really difficult thing to animate is Superman, or

any other 3-D virtual characters in VR.

There are a lot of things you need to get right

when you implement a virtual character.

As human beings ourselves,

we all are very critical observers of those virtual characters.

So if there is anything that goes slightly wrong, we will instantly spot it.

Here is an example, as you can see.

This may not be strictly defined as VR,

because we used a big projector instead of a VR display.

But I like to use this example to show you how the animation was implemented.

The body movement of this avatar was animated with motion capture data

from a real actress.

Here we didn't put any facial expressions on her face, so she looks a bit cold.

But often when it comes to character animation, it is better not to include

something, rather than having something obviously be wrong.

We also programmed her to be interactive, so that when the user moves,

the avatar rotates her head towards that direction,

to give the impression that she is looking at them.

You can do more sophisticated things, but again,

if you can't get something quite right, maybe it's best not to do it.

A lot of the challenges in creating believable virtual character's animations

in VR overlap with the ability of users to interact with them.

So we will talk a bit more about programming interactive virtual characters

later when we discuss VR interaction, as well as later in this specialization,

when we discuss social VR and virtual characters.

Animation is not a problem with most 360-degree videos,

as in this case, you are just capturing objects and their animation.

But a problem is that the only thing you can do

once you've captured a video is cut and resequence the video clips.

You cannot manipulate objects in the footage like you can with model-based VR.

So you would not be able to program the real human actors in the video to

rotate their heads to follow the user, at least not in a naturalistic way.

[MUSIC]

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