This is the home page for CSE 941: Embodied Agents and Human Animation.
An embodied agent is an intelligent agent that has the appearance of a real human. This course will examine issues of creating realistic and believable embodied agents in computer graphics and virtual reality systems, though many of the issues will also apply to robotics. The focus of this class will be on creating agents that appear to be human, both through realistic animation methods and realistic behaviors. In the behavior class, we will look at non-autonomous methods, reflexive agents, and planning models. We will examine issues of sensors and degrees of presentation freedom. The impact of emotions, Animation topics will include improved methods for capture, generation, and playback of animations, recent developments in skeletal animation, and realistic, yet real-time rendering methods for human characters. Students interested in agents and those interested in advanced animation and rendering methods should all find this course interested and challenging.
The structure of the class will be primarily reading and paper presentations. We will be exploring the literature in the field and collaboratively developing a strong foundation for research on embodied agents and human animation. Students will be responsible for finding and sharing appropriate recent work in the field and presenting this work to the class. Presentations will be divided among formal presentations with slides and roundtable discussion groups. Each student will also be responsible for a project that demonstrates some new development in the field of embodied agents or an interesting merging of developments.
The course syllabus is available in PDF format.
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Course resources
Example materials
Lecture setsNotice: Some lecture sets are very large because they contain a large number of images.
Projects