Motion Comics: Visualization, Browsing and Searching of Human Motion Data

Myung Geol Choi, Jehee Lee, Takeo Igarashi, Jun Mitani, Kyung-young Yang

Abstract

The use of motion capture data is becoming popular not only for graphics researcher and developers in industry but for common graphics application users. Recently large motion databases are publicly available on the web. Second Life allows its users to animate their virtual characters by using their own collection of motion data. Even with the proliferation of motion data, searching a desired fragment of motion data from a large data repository is still challenging because of the lack of appropriate user interfaces. A brief description or keyword annotated by the one who acquired motion data might be helpful to some extent. However, text annotation could be subjective and often insufficient for describing the content, style, context, and nuance of human motion. One automated solution is to pick out and display a number of distinctive frames of motion data. This approach efficiently visualize significant moments of motion data but has some limitation to explain overall story of the motion. In addition, it would be difficult to provide a proper search method or interface for the end-users. We introduce a comic-based interface for visualizing, browsing and searching human motion data. A comic is a medium which delivers a story with a sequence of images. The power of comics is in its ability to convey dynamic and temporal information in an abstract form. A small collection of comic-style images can express much information, such as spatial movements, passage of time, the interaction between characters, and their emotional states. Specifically, we aim two goals: One is visualizing motion capture data in a comic style and the other is searching motion data using comicstyle sketch queries.

Publication

Myung Geol Choi, Jehee Lee, Takeo Igarashi, Jun Mitani, Kyung-young Yang,
Motion Comics: Visualization, Browsing and Searching of Human Motion Data,
In ACM SIGGRAPH 2011 Talks, August 7-11, Vancouver. 200KB,    Video: mov,18MB