April 1st, 2013 at 5:00pm PDT, Agenda and Minutes
Due to a request from Joe, the H-Anim WG meeting will be held at the above mentioned date/time. We will skip our regular Wednesday meeting this week.
Agenda items are as follows:
1. Joe's comments about skin
On March 29, Joe mentioned:
I want to make "skin" our #1 effort in this group. One part of this is immediate outreach to other Working Groups and our X3D community to join us in this effort.
As I say in my messages and in the attachment, making a 'standard' humanoid capable of being "calibrated" meaning able to be precisely sized in human dimensions, along with our existing calibratable skeleton, will provide the complete set of interfaces that make realistic solutions for humanoid applications.
So, my suggestion is that "skin" is Number 1 and we leave everything else way down in priority until we compose and document this 'standard' skin or sets of 'standard' skins.
Thank You for all your work that has added to Web3D and X3D. My effort is based on my feeling that the entire reason for realtime 3D and X3D is to add humanistic fidelity and interaction to our X3D Humanoid. Further, I think "skin" is by far the most important next step.
The attachment to the message holds my current thoughts and reasoning to make this shift in our priorities. I am pleased you are free for this call.
In terms of work, please notice that this proposal would result in no immediate node changes or additons to the HAnim component. Changes to the current HAnim FCD would be mostly limited to updating the various LOA examples by (1) addition of various levels of skin density to the feature point tables and (2) add skin to user code examples and (3) documenting skin vertex with joint and displacer bindings.
Several work items including skin can be progressed together. We can merge it with other work items.
Skin examples should provide with the method how to define feature points in relation to not only camera calibration, but also modelling mesh data and motion parameters.
2. William's comments
On March 18, William mentioned:
I think understand your position to keep the biological data separate from 'non-biological' human model definitions. We should quantify how much of the known whole human we are choosing to include in the H-Anim specification, even if we have to guess at the quantification of the whole parametric human. I do think we should include the other display modalities (acoustic and haptic) for the limited human model. While animation of humans is focused on the graphical or visual display of macro scale movements, we should consider the benefits and weakness (burdens) of including the associated acoustic (sonic or aural) and haptic (force or tactile) presentation of humans at the macro scale. When I write macro scale, I'm implying there is a meso, micro and nano scale of human movement that one should be able to animate. I haven't read of any thresholds quantifying what is macro, meso, micro and nano scale human definitions for graphical display. But I am willing to guess they would be described as something like the following
macro scale - bathing, dressing, running, dancing, etc. meso scale - writing, typing, nail cutting, tears forming micro scale - bleeding formation from a tissue level (resolution) scrap or minor cut, seeing lotion absorption as rubbed into skin, seeing a mosquito bite you, etc. nano scale - seeing fertilization , seeing neuron firing from sensation and actuation (motor control signals), etc.
I realize the scales in time and space are independent and the utility and appeal to create such animations will vary widely (hundreds of views versus tens of millions of views in a year or so; implying each view is by a different IP address or human being). I look forward to scoping our work to a plausible timeline for ISO milestone submissions. I want nothing more than to plan what is doable with low risk of failure and delay. I do believe high risk work items and large work volumes must be decomposed into low risk work items for the sake of managing to realistic expectations of an all-volunteer group like ours.
In order to consider all the things above for the new work items, we should develop how to define them first. We can and should research and find solutions about all the things, but currently, if we think to develop standards in SC24, our work may focus on the representation and exchange human models and motion. However, if anyone develops other areas such as biology, medicine, or health besides SC24 concerning human models, I think, they can be other topics co-operated with liaison organizations. At this moment, I think, the scope of the NWIP (10 items in the document) is enough for the first stage of new H-Anim, considering SC24's scope.
3. Scheduling next meeting
(1st Wed) May 1 at 5:00pm PDT (2nd, 9:00am KST) or
(3rd Mon) April 15 at 5:00pm PDT (16th, 9:00am KST)
