Computer animation through the numerical simulation of physics-based graphics models offers unsurpassed realism, but it can be computation(cid:173) ally demanding. This paper demonstrates the possibility of replacing the numerical simulation of nontrivial dynamic models with a dramatically more efficient "NeuroAnimator" that exploits neural networks. Neu(cid:173) roAnimators are automatically trained off-line to emulate physical dy(cid:173) namics through the observation of physics-based models in action. De(cid:173) pending on the model, its neural network emulator can yield physically realistic animation one or two orders of magnitude faster than conven(cid:173) tional numerical simulation.

To create engagement, you have to have a story. In the metaverse, the creators will create the community, and the stories they tell will create the community, just like at the beginning of time. The king's storyteller kept people engaged, Shakespeare kept people engaged,

Back in 1982, computers meant one of two things in the popular imagination. Either they were room-sized machines used by the military-industrial complex to crunch data on stuff like nuclear wars and stock markets, or they were fridge-sized arcade games such as Space Invaders and Pac-Man. Kraftwerk were singing about home computers, but if you owned one at all, it was probably a Sinclair ZX81, which was only marginally more sophisticated than a calculator. And yet, that summer, cinemagoers were catapulted into the digital future. Few appreciated it at the time but with 40 years' hindsight, Steven Lisberger's sci-fi adventure Tron was the shape of things to come: in cinema, in real life, and in virtual life.

Dogs have a sense of the basic way objects should behave, according to scientists, who say they stare longer if a computer animation breaks the laws of physics. Humans use a process known as'contact causality' from an early age to make sense of the physical environment, but little is known about the processes that non-primate animals use to make sense of the world and how things work. To better understand this in dogs, a team at the University of Veterinary Medicine, Vienna, adapted an eye tracking system used on human infants. Dogs were presented with realistic 3D animations of balls that obey and break Newton's basic laws of physics, and tracked their pupil dilation and attention span. The animals tracked the movements of balls closely throughout the study, but pupils were larger when objects in the animations broke the laws of physics.

In aesthetics, the uncanny valley is a hypothesized relationship between the degree of an object's resemblance to a human being and the emotional response to such an object. The concept suggests that humanoid objects which imperfectly resemble actual human beings provoke uncanny or strangely familiar feelings of eeriness and revulsion in observers.[2] "Valley" denotes a dip in the human observer's affinity for the replica, a relation that otherwise increases with the replica's human likeness.[3] Examples can be found in robotics, 3D computer animations, and lifelike dolls. With the increasing prevalence of virtual reality, augmented reality, and photorealistic computer animation, the "valley" has been cited in reaction to the verisimilitude of the creation as it approaches indistinguishability from reality. The uncanny valley hypothesis predicts that an entity appearing almost human will risk eliciting cold, eerie feelings in viewers.[4]

This essay discusses whether computers, using Artificial Intelligence (AI), could create art. First, the history of technologies that automated aspects of art is surveyed, including photography and animation. In each case, there were initial fears and denial of the technology, followed by a blossoming of new creative and professional opportunities for artists. The current hype and reality of Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools for art making is then discussed, together with predictions about how AI tools will be used. It is then speculated about whether it could ever happen that AI systems could be credited with authorship of artwork. It is theorized that art is something created by social agents, and so computers cannot be credited with authorship of art in our current understanding. A few ways that this could change are also hypothesized.

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your Automaton bloggers. We'll also be posting a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next two months; here's what we have so far (send us your events!): Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today's videos. We already posted about the unveiling of Sony's new Aibo, but here's a bit of extra video from the event showing the little robotic dog in live action: In this video we show a compilation of our research for the last 4 years on autonomous navigation of bipedal robots. It is part of the DFG-founded project "Versatile and Robust Walking in Uneven Terrain" (German Research Foundation) and includes development in environment perception and modeling, motion planning and stability control.

Abstract: "Creating realistic virtual humans has traditionally been considered a research problem in Computer Animation primarily for entertainment applications. With the recent breakthrough in collaborative robots and deep reinforcement learning, accurately modeling human movements and behaviors has become a common challenge faced by researchers in robotics, artificial intelligence, as well as Computer Animation. In this talk, I will focus on two different yet highly relevant problems: how to teach robots to move like humans and how to teach robots to interact with humans. While Computer Animation research has shown that it is possible to teach a virtual human to mimic human athletes' movements, transferring such complex controllers to robot hardware in the real world is perhaps even more challenging than learning the controllers themselves. In this talk, I will focus on two strategies to transfer highly dynamic skills from character animation to robots: teaching robots basic self-preservation motor skills and developing data-driven algorithms on transfer learning between simulation and the real world. The second part of the talk will focus on robotic assistance with dressing, which is a prominent activities of daily living (ADLs) most commonly requested by older adults. To safely train a robot to physically interact with humans, one can design a generative model of human motion based on prior knowledge or recorded motion data. Although this approach has been successful in Computer Animation, such as generating locomotion, designing procedures for a loosely defined task, such as "being dressed", is likely to be biased to the specific data or assumptions. I will describe a new approach to modeling human motion without being biased toward specific situations presented in the dataset."

Maria, Marvin, Sonny, David, and Ava are all ordinary-sounding names -- but in film, television, and literature, these seemingly ordinary names belong to extraordinary individuals who, despite their exemplary skills and complex personalities, are not human. Since Brigitte Helm's 1927 portrayal of Maria in Metropolis, audiences have developed an increased love/hate fascination with artificial intelligence. While filmmakers continue to address the controversy regarding the acceptance and cohabitation between humans and their modern creations parallel to real-world technological advancements, just how accurate is this representation in modern film, and have cinematic depictions evolved at all? Early films reflected the heightened fear of technology that developed among the working class during the Industrial Age by depicting metal machines as unstoppable forces of mayhem. This successfully fed into the pre-existing "anti-immigrant" nervous anticipation that technological advancements would go from taking over people's jobs to taking over the world.

Chickens don't have a reputation for being the brightest group in the animal kingdom, but a new study has found we may have dramatically underestimated their brainpower. Researchers found that chickens have distinct personalities, numerical abilities and show self-awareness, among other traits. Dr Lori Marino, a lecturer in Neuroscience at Emory University and the author of the review, said: 'They (chickens) are perceived as lacking most of the psychological characteristics we recognize in other intelligent animals and are typically thought of as possessing a low level of intelligence compared with other animals.' According to Dr. Marino, 'chickens are behaviourally sophisticated, discriminating among individuals, exhibiting Machiavellian-like social interactions, and learning socially in complex ways that are similar to humans.' In a 2005 study, researchers found that domestic chickens are capable of self-control.