Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne - Virtual Reality Laboratory

• Country - Switzerland
• Town - Lausanne
• Web site - http://vrlab.epfl.ch/

The Virtual Reality Lab (VRlab) was created in July 1988 and completely organized by its director, Professor Daniel Thalmann. The laboratory includes a staff of about 25 people. This group is a world-leading pioneer in research related to Virtual humans since its creation. We mainly concentrate our effort in the Modeling and Animation of Interactive and Intelligent Virtual Humans. We develop more advanced models for group behavior, crowds modeling especially in emergency situation, social behavior, and immersive. We are also experts in multimodal interaction with Virtual Environment, including haptics interfaces, as we have the only Haptic Workstation from Immersion in Europe.. Finally, our ultimate research objective is the simulation of Virtual Worlds inhabited by a Virtual Human Society, where agents will co-operate, negotiate, make friends, communicate, group and ungroup, depending on their likes, moods, emotions, goals, fears, etc.

Research areas in VRlab may be separated into 7 classes:

• Immersive and Multimodal interfaces (visual, audio and haptics)
• Motion Control and the simulation of high-level behaviors based on physical laws, and captured data using magnetic sensors.
• Artificial Life and Behavioral Animation, with models for autonomy and perception based on virtual sensors (vision, audition and tactile).
• Shared Virtual Environments, where avatars and autonomous virtual humans can meet in common virtual spaces.
• Augmented Reality, to track body motion and combine real and virtual objects.
• Body deformations, both for real-time and realistic medical applications.
• Standards for body description and animation (MPEG4, HANIM).