Aline Normoyle

• Professor (Assistant) at Bryn Mawr College

Detailed hand motions play an important role in face-to-face communication to emphasize points, describe objects, clarify concepts, or replace words altogether. While shared virtual reality (VR) spaces are becoming more popular, these spaces do not, in most cases, capture and display accurate hand motions. In this paper, we investigate the conseque...

The complexity of game play in online multiplayer games has generated strong interest in modeling the different play styles or strategies used by players for success. We develop a hierarchical Bayesian regression approach for the online multiplayer game Battlefield 3 where performance is modeled as a function of the roles, game type, and map taken...

A primary goal of the Virtual Reality ( VR ) community is to build fully immersive and presence-inducing environments with seamless and natural interactions. To reach this goal, researchers are investigating how to best directly use our hands to interact with a virtual environment using hand tracking. Most studies in this field require participants...

With game play data, empirical approaches to clustering are typically based solely on game outcomes, e.g. kills, deaths, and score for each player. In this paper, we investigate a method for clustering players based on how a player’s choices relate to outcomes, or equivalently the latent player styles exhibited by players. Our approach is based on...

Augmented reality (AR) gaming is becoming widely available thanks to improvements in hand-held devices such as phones and tablets. In this work, we describe our system for generating levels for the AR game, Q*bird. In Q*bird, the player must visit every cell in the level while avoiding bees and cannon balls, similarly to the 1982 arcade game, Q*ber...

In this work, we investigate the influence of different visualizations on a manipulation task in virtual reality (VR). Without the haptic feedback of the real world, grasping in VR might result in intersections with virtual objects. As people are highly sensitive when it comes to perceiving collisions, it might look more appealing to avoid intersec...

In this paper, we present a novel method for constrained cluster size signed spectral clustering which allows us to subdivide large groups of people based on their relationships. In general, signed clustering only requires K hard clusters and does not constrain the cluster sizes. We extend signed clustering to include cluster size constraints. Usin...

Real-time animation controllers are fundamental for animating characters in response to player input in digital games. However, the design of such controllers requires making trade-offs between the naturalness of the character's motions and the promptness of the character's response. In this paper, we investigate the effects of such trade-offs on t...

For interactive 3D applications and games, the ability to edit, combine, and adapt motion capture is an important technique for reducing labor, project complexity, and storage overhead. Stylistic motion capture, in particular, has unique challenges since editing can alter the original intent of the actor -- sometimes with poor consequences as viewe...

Real-time animation controllers are fundamental for animating characters in response to player input. However, the design of such controllers requires making trade-offs between the naturalness of the character's motions and the promptness of the character's response. In this paper, we investigate the effects of such tradeoffs on the players' enjoym...

Viewers effortlessly decouple action from style for human motion. Regardless of whether style refers to the subtle differences between individuals (John Wayne's walk versus Charlie Chaplin's walk) or to the manner in which the same action is expressed (such as a sad walk versus a nervous walk), the core intent of an action is readily recognizable.

Response lag in digital games is known to negatively affect a player's game experience. Particularly with networked multiplayer games, where lag is typically unavoidable, the impact of delays needs to be well understood so that its effects can be mitigated. In this paper, we investigate two aspects of lag independently: latency (constant delay) and...

Crowd activities are often randomized to create the appearance of heterogeneity. However, the parameters that control randomization are frequently hard to tune because it is unclear how changes at the character level affect the high-level appearance of the crowd. We propose a method for computing randomization parameters that supports direct animat...

Adventure role playing games (RPGs) provide players with increasingly expansive worlds, compelling storylines, and meaningful fictional character interactions. Despite the fast-growing richness of these worlds, the majority of interactions between the player and non-player characters (NPCs) still remain scripted. In this paper we propose using an N...

Motion capture remains a popular and widely-used method for animating virtual characters. However, all practical applications of motion capture rely on motion editing techniques to increase the reusability and flexibility of captured motions. Because humans are proficient in detecting and interpreting subtle details in human motion, understanding t...

Player metrics are an invaluable resource for game designers and QA analysts who wish to understand players, monitor and improve game play, and test design hypotheses. Usually such metrics are collected in a straightforward manner by passively recording players; however, such an approach has several potential drawbacks. First, passive recording mig...

Digital games with realistic virtual characters have become very popular. The ability for players to promptly control their character is a crucial feature of these types of games, be it platform games, first-person shooters, or role-playing games. Delays in the responsiveness of a player's character, for example due to extensive AI calculations or...

Large datasets of real human behaviors are of huge benefit across numerous domains, including evacuation safety, urban planning, marketing, and ergonomics. However, because large-scale experiments involving real human subjects are expensive and prohibitively difficult to organize, such datasets are scarce. Thus in this paper, we propose the use of...

Motion capture data have been used effectively in many areas of human motion synthesis. Among those, motion graph-based approaches have shown great promise for novice users due to their ability to generate long motions and the fully automatic process of motion synthesis. The performance of motion graph based approaches, however, relies heavily on s...

Many simulators today contain traditional opponents and lack an asymmetric insurgent style adversary. InsurgiSim prototypes an embeddable testbed containing a threat network of agents that one can easily configure and deploy for training and analysis purposes. The insurgent network was constructed inside a socio-cognitive agent framework FactionSim...

This paper presents an approach to modeling social transgressions in agent based systems. The approach is intended to be abstract enough that it may be used with many different theories of transgression, apology, forgiveness, etc. In the first half of the paper, we consider what features of transgressions, people’s emotional reactions to transgress...

Advances in computer graphics hardware have led to astounding increases in visual realism for 3D environments. Although this improved visual realism can lead to a better sense of immersion and a more faithful reproduction of the natural world, it does not necessarily promote increased awareness of an evolving situation. Although some requirements o...

We experimented with several feature selection and re-duction techniques, such as PCA, K-means, and Gabor fil-tering for images, and mutual information and td-idf encod-ings for blogs. Additionally, we compared the accuracy of different feature spaces and classification algorithms such as SVMs, KNN, Naive Bayes, and Boosting. Our experi-ments sugge...