This work addresses the development of a character animation editing method that accommodates animation changes while preserving the animator’s original artistic intent. Our goal is to give the artist control over the automatic editing of animations by extending them with artist-defined metadata. We propose a metadata representation that describes which aspects of an animation can be varied. To make the authoring process easier, we have developed an interface for specifying the metadata. Our method extracts a collection of trajectories of both effectors and objects for the animation. We approximate and parameterize the trajectories with a series of cubic Bézier curves. Then, we generate a set of high-level parameters for editing which are related to trajectory deformations. The only possible deformations are those that preserve the fine structure of the original motion. From the trajectories, we use inverse kinematics to generate a new animation that conforms to the user’s edits while preserving the overall character of the original.

Coloring books capture the imagination of children and provide them with one of their earliest opportunities for creative expression. However, given the proliferation and popularity of digital devices, real-world activities like coloring can seem unexciting, and children become less engaged in them. Augmented reality holds unique potential to impact this situation by providing a bridge between real-world activities and digital enhancements. In this paper, we present an augmented reality coloring book App in which children color characters in a printed coloring book and inspect their work using a mobile device. The drawing is detected and tracked, and the video stream is augmented with an animated 3-D version of the character that is textured according to the child's coloring. This is possible thanks to several novel technical contributions. We present a texturing process that applies the captured texture from a 2-D colored drawing to both the visible and occluded regions of a 3-D character in real time. We develop a deformable surface tracking method designed for colored drawings that uses a new outlier rejection algorithm for real-time tracking and surface deformation recovery. We present a content creation pipeline to efficiently create the 2-D and 3-D content. And, finally, we validate our work with two user studies that examine the quality of our texturing algorithm and the overall App experience.

We investigate the influence of motion effects in the domain of mobile Augmented Reality (AR) games on user experience and task performance. The work focuses on evaluating responses to a selection of synthesized camera oriented reality mixing techniques for AR, such as motion blur, defocus blur, latency and lighting responsiveness. In our cross section of experiments, we observe that these measures have a significant impact on perceived realism, where aesthetic quality is valued. However, lower latency records the strongest correlation with improved subjective enjoyment, satisfaction, and realism, and objective scoring performance. We conclude that the reality mixing techniques employed are not significant in the overall user experience of a mobile AR game, except where harmonious or convincing blended AR image quality is consciously desired by the participants.