Our group focuses on exploring new ways for interacting with digital media including images, videos, animations, and games based on the state-of-the-art research in Computer Graphics, Human-Computer Interaction, and Mixed Reality. We are particularly interested in building metaverses in which a large number of users can share the same virtual environment and interact with each other in a synchronized manner. We currently focus on providing the users with intuitive editors for building their own metaverse environments, as well as with immersive terminals for participating in such environments with other users in virtual reality.
It has been a challenging research topic in computer graphics and robotics to plan the motions of multiple entities such that they can collaborate with each other to achieve meaningful objectives. Increasing the number of entities generally leads to the rapid growth of the possibilities of combining their motions, and thus makes it hard to find a plausible combination efficiently. With the help of motion planning and machine learning algorithms, we aim at developing practical methods for automatically synthesizing and interactively controlling the coordinated motions of dozens of animated characters or physical robots.
The recent popularization of 3D printing, IoT, and open source software/hardware platforms allows even non-experts to build complicated systems consisting of mechanical, electronic, and computational parts. However, beginners often have difficulties in designing such a system in which hundreds and thousands of parts need to be fitted together in both logically and physically correct ways. We believe that semi-automated approaches based on both interactive techniques and optimization algorithms will be able to facilitate the design of complicated systems and to significantly lower the barrier to personal manufacturing.
Studying science, technology, engineering, and mathematics is often difficult and boring for not a few persons. A lot of concepts in those fields are usually presented in abstract forms, such as equations, graphs, and symbolic diagrams. It is hard to figure out how such abstract representations can be applied to specific real-world situations. We are interested in creating educational games in which the STEM concepts are visualized and simulated in intuitive ways. We expect that interacting with such visually represented concepts as well as competing with other players will make learning in STEM easier and more enjoyable.
Our group has been funded by the following government research projects.