The Digital Body: Capturing, modeling and animating realistic 3D human avatars

Michael J. Black (Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems)
Chair: Robert Trappl (Austrian Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence)

We interact with the world through our bodies. As many of our interactions move on-line, we become literally disembodied in the virtual world, breaking the metaphor of the Internet as a replica of our physical space. Can we take our bodies with us on-line? Similarly, AI research today focuses on intelligent systems that lack a human form. Does an AI need a digital body to understand us? To become a digital human, indistinguishable from a real person, avatars need to look like us, move like us, and behave like us. This talk will introduce the current state of the art in capturing, modeling, and animating realistic 3D human bodies. For computers to understand and model us, they need a mathematical description of human form. The talk will introduce the latest technology for 4-dimensional body capture and how machine learning is enabling the creation of virtual humans.

Michael J. Black received his B.Sc. from the University of British Columbia (1985), his M.S. from Stanford (1989), and his Ph.D. from Yale University (1992). After post-doctoral research at the University of Toronto, he worked at Xerox PARC as a member of research staff and an area manager. From 2000 to 2010 he was on the faculty of Brown University in the Department of Computer Science (Assoc. Prof. 2000-2004, Prof. 2004-2010). He is one of the founding directors at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in Tübingen, Germany, where he leads the Perceiving Systems department. He is also a Distinguished Amazon Scholar, an Honorarprofessor at the University of Tuebingen, and Adjunct Professor at Brown University. His work has won several awards including the IEEE Computer Society Outstanding Paper Award (1991), Honorable Mention for the Marr Prize (1999 and 2005), the 2010 Koenderink Prize for Fundamental Contributions in Computer Vision, and the 2013 Helmholtz Prize for work that has stood the test of time.
He is a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. In 2013 he co-founded Body Labs Inc., which was acquired by Amazon in 2017.