Prof. Nadia Magnenat-Thalmann

MIRALab - University of Geneva

24 Rue Général Dufour
CH-1211
Geneve-4

Switzerland

www.miralab.unige.ch
 T.: +41 (0)22 705 7769
Fax: +41 (0)22 705 7780
nadia.thalmann@miralab.unige.ch

MIRALab - University of Geneva was created by Professor Nadia Magnenat-Thalmann in 1989. The group is an assembly of many different people from many different countries and academic backgrounds: from computer science to electrical engineering, from physics to architecture, from networking to design and many more besides. When the laboratory was first formed, the main goal was to model and animate 3D virtual humans, creating the basic underlying structures. The laboratory produces numerous papers per year, it has hosted many conferences.

MIRALab has actively participated in many EU projects since its first in 1995, called HUMANOID. Projects have been centered on many different areas of research, several of which are on medical and health care related. In CHARM and MIAS, MIRALab contributed in the anatomical modeling, functional simulations and visualization of human upper limb. In TREMOR, JUST and DRAMA, MIRALab participated in elaborating VR based tools, to provide advanced support for continuous education, rehabilitation and training.

Currently, within a competence network, MIRALab is involved in the Swiss national project COME where the global objective consists in understanding and visualizing the functionalities of human articulations and in simulating them in motion. Medical doctors will benefit from this technology, as they will be able to visualize and interact with a 3D functional model of articulations, observe their motion, and make different experiments on them. At a long term they will be able to diagnose possible problems for a given articulation.

 Participants CVs

 1. Prof Nadia Magnenat-Thalmann

Nadia Magnenat-Thalmann has pioneered research into virtual humans over the last 20 years. She studied at the University of Geneva and obtained several degrees including Psychology, Biology, Chemistry, and a PhD in Quantum Physics at the University of Geneva in 1977. From 1977 to 1989, she was a Professor at the University of Montreal in Canada . In 1989, she founded MIRALab, an interdisciplinary creative research laboratory at the University of Geneva . She has published more than 200 papers, is editor-in-chief of the Visual Computer and the Journal of Visualization and Computer Animation journal. She has received several awards and recently, she has been nominated at the Swiss Academy of Technical Sciences.

2. Dr Laurent Moccozet

Dr. Laurent Moccozet is a computer scientist. He is currently working at the University of Geneva as Maître d'Enseignement et de Recherche (MER). His main areas of interests are geometric modeling, geometric deformations and their application to human modeling and simulation. He has completed his PhD in October 1996: Hand Modeling and Animation for Virtual Humans. This work was part of the HUMANOID I and II European projects in "interaction in 3D modeling" and "deformation of the body while in motion". Since July 2001, he has been involved in COME project for anatomical and functional modeling of human articulations.

3. Dr Tom Molet

Dr. Tom Molet is a post-doctoral assistant at MIRALab, University of Geneva . He received his PhD in Computer Science in November 1998 at the Computer Graphics Lab, EPFL (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology): “Human motion capture study for interaction in virtual environments ". His main research interests are Virtual Human Modeling, Animation and Virtual Reality, more specifically Human Motion Capture and Performance Animation. He is also involved in COME project for using optical motion capture to study joints kinematics.

4. Chris Joslin

Chris Joslin obtained his Masters degree in Electronic and Communication Engineering from the University of Bath (UK) in 1997. He is currently working on 3D spatial audio for real-time virtual environments. His interests include virtual reality, spatial audio, networking for collaborative virtual environments, parallel processing algorithms/scheduling, video/audio compression, and video processing. He is currently a PhD candidate and research assistant at MIRALab, university of Geneva .