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Preface. <p>List of Contributors.</p> <p>List of Figures.</p> <p>List of Tables.</p> <p>1. An Overview of Virtual Humans (Nadia Magnenat Thalmann and Daniel Thalmann).</p> <p>2. Face Cloning and Face Motion Capture (Wonsook Lee, Taro Goto, Sumedha Kshirsagar, Tom Molet).</p> <p>3. Body Cloning and Body Motion Capture (Pascal Fua, Ralf Plaenkers, WonSook Lee, Tom Molet).</p> <p>4. Anthropometric Body Modeling (Hyewon Seo).</p> <p>5. Body Motion Control (Ronan Boulic, Paolo Baerlocher).</p> <p>6. Facial Deformation Models (Prem Kalra, Stephane Garchery, Sumedha Kshirsagar).</p> <p>7. Body Deformations (Amaury Aubel).</p> <p>8. Hair Simulation (Sunil Hadap).</p> <p>9. Cloth Simulation (Pascal Volino, Frédéric Cordier).</p> <p>10. Expressive Speech Animation and Facial Communication (Sumedha Kshirsagar, Arjan Egges, Stéphane Garchery).</p> <p>11. Behavioral Animation (Jean-Sébastien Monzani, Anthony Guye-Vuilleme, Etienne de Sevin).</p> <p>12. Body Gesture Recognition and Action Response (Luc Emering, Bruno Herbelin).</p> <p>13. Interaction with 3-D Objects (Marcello Kallmann).</p> <p>14. Groups and Crowd Simulation (Soraia Raupp Musse, Branislav Ulicny, Amaury Aubel).</p> <p>15. Rendering of Skin and Clothes (Neeharika Adabala).</p> <p>16. Standards for Virtual Humans (Stéphane Garchery, Ronan Boulic, Tolga Capin, Prem Kalra).</p> <p>Appendix A: Damped Least Square Pseudo-Inverse J+^<i>A</i>.</p> <p>Appendix B: H-Anim Joint and Segment Topology.</p> <p>Appendix C: Facial Animation Parameter Set .</p> <p>References.</p> <p>Index.</p>

<p>Professor Nadia Magnenat Thalmann is an eminent computer graphics scientist who is the founder and head of MIRALab at the University of Geneva. She presently serves as the Director of the Institute for Media Innovation in Singapore at Nanyang Technological University. Prof. Daniel Thalmann is a Swiss and Canadian Computer Scientist and a pioneer in Virtual Humans. He is currently Honorary Professor at EPFL, Switzerland, and Director of Research Development at MIRALab Sarl.

Virtual Humans simulations are becoming increasingly popular and many systems are now available to animate Virtual Humans. Such systems encompass several different domains including autonomous agents in virtual environments, human factors analysis, training, education, virtual prototyping, simulation-based design and entertainment. <p>At the moment Virtual Humans are most commonly used in the entertainment industry and specifically in movies and video games. However, there are many current and potential applications of human activities that may be part of a system involving Virtual Humans in a wide range of areas including simulation, emergency situations, medical applications and engineering.</p> <ul> <li>Covers all aspects of Virtual Humans</li> <li>Explains the concept of avatars and autonomous virtual actors and the main techniques to create and animate their bodies and faces</li> <li>Presents the concepts of behavioral animation, crowd simulation, intercommunication between Virtual Humans and interaction between real humans and autonomous Virtual Humans</li> <li>Addresses the advanced topics of hair representation and cloth animation with applications in fashion design</li> <li>Discusses the standards for Virtual Humans and a platform for real-time simulation</li> </ul> <p>Written by leading experts in the area, the <i>Handbook of Virtual Humans</i> covers the basic principles through to state-of-the-art and advanced concepts in this exciting field. Engineers, researchers and developers in computer graphics, computer animation, virtual reality and game development will all find this reference indispensable.</p>

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