As we come to the end of 2019, we thought we’d take the opportunity to take a look at some of the year’s highlights at CAMERA!

New Collaborations & Awards

We are thrilled to have secured funding from The European Structural Investment Fund for a second studio providing state-of-the-art motion capture facilities to digital creative and digital healthcare companies in Bath and Bristol.

We celebrated the appointment of Dr Steffi Colyer to Lecturer in Biomechanics within the University of Bath’s Department for Health.

Dr Dario Cazzola was elected as an Executive Council member of the International Society of Biomechanics.

CAMERA is proud to have joined Immerse UK’s new premium membership as a Founding Member. Check out CAMERA’s showcase!

CAMERA were commissioned by Mesmerix to build a virtual 3D model of the famous statue of Jane Austen standing outside the Jane Austen museum in Bath using portable 3D scanners. Find out more about the creation of the Augmented Reality Experience on our blog.

CAMERA provided the motion capture for 11-11: Memories Retold, the first video game from Aardman Animations which was nominated for two BAFTA Games Awards, British Game and Game Beyond Entertainment and which scooped the Best Educational/Serious Game Award at the TIGA awards.

CAMERA was proud to contribute digital characters, using our proprietary animation technology, to Satore Studios’ Raindance award-winning VR production Cosmos Within Us directed by Tupac Martir.

CAMERA collaborated with Aardman on a BBC virtual reality documentary about the story of twin sisters whose lives were torn apart by a terrible accident, Is Anna OK?. Researchers used motion capture technology to make the movement of the characters more realistic. In particular, they used the latest research methods in facial animation to analyse the 3D movement of the actor’s face and transfer it onto the face of the animated character.

New Research Projects

An exciting new European Space Agency funded project launched at CAMERA in January. Researchers James Cowburn, Dr Dario Cazzola, and Dr Steffi Colyer are assessing the movement forces on human lower limbs in low gravity settings using computer simulation and anti-gravity devices. Find a new update on the project on our blog.

A partnership between the healthtech company Living With, the Royal United Hospitals Bath NHS Foundation Trust (RUH), and the University of Bath has been awarded a major grant to develop a Rheumatoid Arthritis Flare Profiler. The award, from Innovate UK, will allow rheumatoid arthritis (RA) patients to use new methods capturing key disease activity data from smartphones, which will support clinicians to be able to classify and optimise care pathways.

Researchers at CAMERA have developed a new way of designing and manufacturing bespoke prosthetic liners, in less than a day. This potentially life-changing project is combining advances in computer science with an innovative manufacturing process to create affordable new personalised prosthetic liners for lower limb amputees.

Prof Darren Cosker launched a new collaborative project funded by the Medical Research Council (MRC), working alongside Dr Isabelle Mareschal (Principal Investigator), of Queen Mary University and Prof Essi Viding of University College London. The project will investigate individual differences in facial emotion perception and their association with psychiatric risk indicators.

New Colleagues

Rosie Barnett joined us as our Research Assistant on an exciting new project funding by the National Ankylosing Spondyloarthritis Society. The project assesses the impact of rehabilitative interventions on the natural history of ankylosing spondyloarthritis and to create a new digital database of patient records spanning over 30 years.

CAMERA is always excited to develop talent and this year we created a new Student Technician Team to work within the studio on research and commercial projects, both within the University and with external industry clients.

We welcomed Yiguo Qiao (Joyce) to the CAMERA team as a new Research Associate, working on the Rheumatoid Arthritis Flare Profiler project.

We were joined by our new Research Associate Dr Logan Wade  from the University of Queensland. Logan has been working closely with Dr Polly McGuigan and Prof James Bilzon, with new markerless motion capture system and the Qualysis motion capture system to examine key variables in clinical prosthetic, knee pain and ankylosing spondylitis populations.

Anca Salagean joined CAMERA as a PhD student. Anca’s PhD is part of the Arts and Humanities Research Council’s (AHRC) Creative Industries Clusters Programme. Under the supervision of Prof Danae Stanton Fraser and Prof Darren Cosker, empoying motion capture, videogrammetry and virtual reality technologies to investigate users’ embodiment in virtual reality.

A warm welcome to Dr Laurie Needham who joined CAMERA as a Research Associate in the Department for Health and will be exploring the use of markerless motion capture and other computer vision techniques for applications within sports biomechanics.

Dr Daniela De Angeli has joined CAMERA as a Research Associate within the Department of Computer Science. Dr De Angeli will be working closely with Prof Eamonn O’Neill researching whether games have a positive influence in players’ behaviour, and if so, how they can be designed for social impact.

Supervised by CAMERA Director Prof Darren Cosker, George Fletcher joined us from the University of Oxford. He is a member of the first cohort of PhD students at the University of Bath’s Centre for Doctoral Training in Accountable, Responsible and Transparent AI (ART-AI).

CAMERA and The Department for Health welcomed Yi Wan, our newest member of the CAMERA team. Yi is a China Scholarship PhD Student who will be working on the use of visual biofeedback in the prevention and management of knee osteoarthritis.

New Publications & Conferences

Dr Yong-liang Yang, Senior Lecturer and CAMERA Co-Investigator has three papers accepted by SIGGRAPH Asia 2019, ICCV 2019, and Pacific Graphics 2019.

PhD student Tobias Bertel presented the MegaParallax research at IEEEVR 2019. Find out more about the collaborative work with Dr Christian Richardt and Dr Neill Campbell on the project website.

PhD student Maryam Naghizadeh was invited to present her work with Prof Cosker at CGI’19. Computer Graphics International is one of the oldest international annual conferences in Computer Graphics and one of the most important ones worldwide, founded by the Computer Graphics Society (CGS).

EngD Researcher Kyle Reed presented his work at ACM SIGGRAPH/Eurographics Symposium of Computer Animation this July. Read more about User‐Guided Facial Animation through an Evolutionary Interface here.

CDE Research Engineer Catherine Taylor presented her work at SCA 2019, ISMAR 2019 and SIGGRAPH 2019 this year. Listen to Catherine discuss her work here.

Jacob Hadnett-Hunter attended the Symposium on Applied Perception (SAP 2019) in Barcelona to present a paper in Transactions on Applied Perception (TAP) entitled ‘The effect of task on visual attention in interactive virtual environments‘.

Prof James Bilzon and Dr Elena Seminati attended ISPO Congress 2019 in Japan, to present their work.

Dr Neill Campbell presented the new paper ‘Fixing Implicit Derivatives: Trust-Region Based Learning of Continuous Energy Functions‘ collaborating with Matteo Toso CVSSP, University of Surrey and Dr Chris Russell CVSSP, University of Surrey and The Alan Turing Institute, at the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems.

CAMERA’s Co-Investigator, Dr Christian Richardt’s collaborative paper ‘Neural Style-Preserving Visual Dubbing’ was presented at Siggraph Asia 2019 Conference and Exhibition on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques in November.

We also continued our popular CAMERA Expert Speaker Series (which offers free, regular seminars open to all). The series brings leading experts from both industry and academia to the University of Bath. This year we welcomed Professor Alan Wilson from the Royal Veterinary College and Dr Will Smith from the University of York.  Keep an eye out for more sessions in 2020. Recordings can be found here.

Looking forward to seeing what 2020 brings! Wishing you all a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!