Background Research

I just got sent this interesting research paper, "TotalRecall: Visualization and Semi-Automatic Annotation of Very Large Audio-Visual Corpora." It's by the folks over at the MIT Media Lab. The reason why I thought the paper was interesting was not for the TotalRecall technology itself, but for one of the images within the paper.

After seeing this, I started thinking about how we can possibly visualize actors moving inside the motion capture area, since most motions aren't captured with the actor standing in one spot only. At this point, I still don't know if this visualization is entirely necessary, but it's something worthwhile to think about. Since parts of the image in the MIT paper looked like motion trails of some sort, that somehow led me to think about heat maps, which consequently led me to this Tracking Taxi Flow Across the City by the NYTimes Graphics Department. I thought that maybe we can apply the concept of heat maps to visualizing a short period of motion across a space.

However, we should still be able to see the actual motions themselves in some way. This paper showcases an interesting image, where you don't see frames at measured intervals, but you see frames when they are of importance in the motion.

What if we were to add a smooth curve connecting the root of the skeleton in each frame? This could showcase the change in y-position throughout the motion, which can be useful.

My sketches are below. Apologies if you can't read my handwriting. I would appreciate any thoughts/comments on these! They are very rudimentary as of now. Also, you'll notice the monitor behind the sheet of paper. I took the picture with my iPhone.

Abstract

A big issue facing technology today is how to make sorting through search results faster and more efficient. The computer graphics industry is not devoid of said issue, particularly when it comes to finding appropriate motion capture data for projects. Since acquiring and maintaining a good motion capture system is both cumbersome and expensive, the need to have accessible and relevant motion data  is prevalent. However, searching for motions is not an easy task. Currently, the leading motion data provider, Carnegie Mellon University, has a system where users search based on tags. However, the tags can be misleading, in that one person's perception of "walk" may be very different than someone else's, and results returned to you are listed in a text-only format. Thus, how do you improve the results sorting process to easily find the motion you want? How would you interpret and display the 3D data so that users can efficiently analyze and compare search results without having to download and open movie files? I hope to use my knowledge of data visualization to come up with a better and more visual solution to this problem, supporting the final solution with data obtained from user studies.

[Edit: January 21]
In this past week, I met with Joe and David Comberg (who is going to be one of my advisors, focusing on design and visualization). He suggested I meet with a new FNAR professor, Orkan Telhan, who specializes in interdisciplinary art and design. I'm quite keen to get his thoughts.

I also found a paper on IEEE titled "A Study on Motion Visualization System Using Motion Capture Data," and the abstract sounded exactly like what I was looking for. However, the actual paper was not so relevant. Boo.

For the week of January 24, I plan on doing more research, reading more papers, and finding more examples of visualizations that relate to this project. Maybe I'll actually find a decent reference editor for the Mac. And maybe I'll also get to play with the brand new shiny Mac Pro that is going to reside in the SIG Lab (thanks Amy!). You have no idea how excited I am about this. OS X is what I primarily use at home, and to be able to work on this project in the same developing environment in the SIG Lab will be tremendously convenient and helpful.

[Edit: January 23]
If you want to read my proposal, you can find it here.