Interactive aesthetic selection is used to evolve populations of images. The images are generated using continuous layered pattern functions which are based on procedural texturing techniques. Gene values are used to control the visual properties of regular and irregular layered feature patterns. A wide range of feature shapes is produced by implicit shape function blending and bombing. The evolved images are used to produce height fields whichcan be converted to multiuser game maps. The parametric design space defined by the chosen representation can be controllably biased toward specific formal qualities.

Human figure animation is it widely researched area with many applications. This paper addresses specific issues that deal with the synthesis, animation and environmental interaction of human figures within a virtual space teleconferencing system. A layered representation of the human figure is adopted. Skeletal posture is determined from magnetic sensors on the body, using heuristics and inverse kinematics. This paper describes the use of implicit function techniques in the synthesis and animation of a polymesh geometric skin over the skeletal structure. Implicit functions perform detection and handling of collisions with an optimal worst case time complexity that is linear in the number polymesh vertices. Body deformations resulting from auto-collisions are handled elegantly and homogeneously as part of the environment. Further, implicit functions generate precise collision contact surfaces and have the capability to model the physical characteristics of muscles in systems that employ force feedback. The real time implementation within a virtual space teleconferencing system, illustrates this new approach, coupling polymesh and implicit surface based modeling and animation techniques.

We present a set of library routines that allow easily parallelized graphics rendering routines that require no communication between each parallel task, such as ray‐tracing, to be run efficiently in an environment of distributed workstations. The presentation of the paper focuses on the problems encountered in implementing a distributed system under Unix and proposes solutions to each problem. Specifically, we discuss the challenges involved in overcoming the limits of communicating with a large number of processes in Unix and in providing fault tolerance when using sockets. Technical aspects of the implementation and some additional problems that were encountered are discussed. Finally, we compare the rendering times for a complex image with a renderer using the library and show that the library routines are able to exploit much of the existing parallelism. The library is presented using a graphics application, though the concepts are generic enough to be of use in designing any distributed system under Unix.

We present a technique to extract motion parameters of a human figure from a single video stream. Our goal is to prototype motion synthesis rapidly for game design and animation applications. For example, our approach is especially useful in situations where motion capture systems are restricted in their usefulness given the various required instrumentation. Similarly, our approach can be used to synthesize motion from archival footage. By extracting the silhouette of the foreground figure and using a model-based approach, the problem is re-formulated as a local, optimized search of the pose space. The pose space consists of 6 rigid body transformation parameters plus the internal joint angles of the figure. The silhouette of the figure from the captured video is compared against the silhouette of a synthetic figure using a pixel-by-pixel, distance-based cost function to evaluate goodness-of-fit. For a single video stream, this is not without problems. Occlusion and ambiguities arising from the use of a single view often cause spurious reconstruction of the captured motion. By using temporal coherence, physical constraints, and knowledge of the anatomy, a viable pose sequence can be reconstructed for many live-action sequences.