MIRALab Research Projects

As a part of MIRALab’s involvement in 3D Life, I am one of the 3 MIRALab members of the Network Steering Board. The board consists of senior members of the network from the seven core partners, discussing issues like financial planning, integration planning and updated joint project activities. As a researcher I’m actively involved in Activity 4.3: “Virtual Humans, Rendering and Animation”.

For the duration of the project I have been responsible for the development of the Virtual Try On as a web service. The Virtual Try On is an application that lets you try on and customize (for style and fit) 3D physically simulated garments on a 3D representation of your own body. Within SERVIVE, MIRALab – University of Geneva provided this application as a web service, for which a web-application has been developed by Digital Humans.

As part of Leapfrog I have been responsible for the software integration of all components that made up the Virtual Try On. The Virtual TryOn is a web-enabled interactive 3D platform which enables consumers to virtually evaluate physically simulated 3D garments on a 3D digital representation of their own body.

As part of the Epoch Characterise project I have been involved in releasing vhdPLUS as Open Source. The vhdPLUS Development Framework is a modern, fully component oriented simulation engine and software middleware solution created by and reflecting many years of the R&D experience of both the MIRALab, University of Geneva and VRlab, EPFL labs in the domain of VR/AR and virtual character simulation.

University projects

As part of my studies in Computer Science at the University of Twente, besides regular coursework, I have been involved in several interesting projects. From time to time biting of more than we could chew and spending more time on them then what could be considered healthy, we at least had great fun and got some nice results:

• A Rigid Body Dynamics simulator, developed together with Ebor Folkertsma. It was a nice project and it taught us a lot. You can still download some very old demos here.
• 3DWebcam was a project in which Ingo Wassink and I created a stereo vision application using two webcams in Java from scratch. Yeah, we liked a challenge and devoured  the great Hartley and Zisserman book.
• Noffel is the name of our dear robot. We built a robot, using Lego and their RCX controller (for which we wrote our own control software) + servos, that could raise and lower the eyebrows, blink and move its mouth. This all combined with an emotional model as well as speech generation and recognition.  A photo made it onto the promotional brochures of HMI.
• During my Imaging minor we developed traffic light tracking software for the blind, which determined whether or not pedestrian traffic lights were red or green. All this based on Fourrier Descriptors and preprocessing filters written in Matlab, which at the time was still horrendously slow for anything involving loops. Yes, I’m that old.