Hello... At 16:19 17/11/01 -0500, Johannes Birringer wrote: >I was not clear about Scott's interest in the distinction >between fiction (animation) and motion problems (biomechanics), were you >implying you are interested in the capture of different stillnesses >/"motion problems"? How would this connect to cognitive science and >visualizations of consciousness? We have probably about 7 different conversations related to 'stillness' going on here -- the joys of listserv dialogue such as it is -- but the distinction I drew in that initial post on 12 November -- was made in order to frame an 'industry' (the motion capture industry) as a broad field of activity involving many many people in the capture of motion for the purposes of either (more or less) animation or biomechanics. My initial post suggests that the 'stillness capture' might be an interesting project to conduct in the context of this industry. Richard Widgery responded, that they (forgive me Richard for using you to represent the 'industry') "do" capture stillness for animation purposes, and he and I had an interesting exchange regarding robots and the fact that to endow a robot for example with this stillness would present an entirely different set of problems. To this I responded that what interests me (one of my central interests) are these sorts of problems and the people and knowledge of motion/ stillness that become engaged in seeking the solutions to them. One could unpick where this problem solving 'might' involve practitioners/ specialists from the field of cognitive science (a field definitely involved with robot making) and visualisations of consciousness ----------- but I'm not going to attempt to do that here and now. But what I would like to point out is a glaring omission of information, of exactly the sort that concerns me, this last Sunday in the New York Times -- the 'entertainment section'. For those of you who want to read it November 18, 2001 -- When a Cyberstar is Born, by Dave Kehr. One of the main thrusts of this long article is to point out that C.G.I. is only traditional animation with an "aspiration to photorealism". Here is a quote: "Today's C.G.I. processes are nothing more than technologically advanced versions of traditional animation techniques, with the computer console replacing the drawing board and animation stand of the past. Animators deal with pixels as well as paint brushes, combining techniques to create such memorable images as the stampede in "The Lion King" (1994)" ----------- > what Kehr does here in one sentence in surely one of the most widely read of newspaper sections worldwide (don't quote me) is to miss the opportunity to convey that one of the most interesting features of contemporary computer graphics is that it is essentially software -- and as such it deviates fundamentally from former 'traditional' methods of materialising image. And software draws on different fields of knowledge, some of which may not have overlapped as explicitly in the past, in order to solve whatever problems are being posed. So, for example, the LION KING stampede is NOT being hand drawn in key frames and then the 'in betweens' filled in by the computer as implied by Kehr -- it is using algorithms developed in the field of Artificial Life for example that are also being used in the simulation and analysis of large group behavior such as herding, flocking or schooling. Two interesting sources for information about this: Craig Reynold's site: http://www.red3d.com/cwr/boids/ -- and take a look at the interview Paul Kaiser did with Michael Girard and Susan Amkraut on their work at http://www.riverbed.com best scott
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