We introduced in 1990 an animation approach where synthetic vision is used for navigation by a virtual actor. The vision is the only channel of information between the actor and its environment and offers a universal approach to pass the necessary information from the environment to an actor in the problems of path searching, obstacle avoidance, and internal knowledge representation with learning and forgetting characteristics. For the general navigation problem, we propose a local and a global approach. In the global approach, a dynamic octree serves as global 3D visual memory and allows an actor to memorize their environment that he sees and to adapt it to a changing and dynamic environment. His reasoning process allows him to find 3D paths based on his visual memory by avoiding impasses and circuits. In the local approach, low level vision based navigation reflexes, normally performed by intelligent actors, are simulated. The local navigation model uses the direct input information from his visual environment to reach goals or subgoals and to avoid unexpected obstacles.
Synthetic vision has been first implemented by Olivier Renault, then a more global approach has been developed by Hansrudi Noser.
H. Noser, D. Thalmann, Synthetic Vision and Audition for Digital Actors, Proc. Eurographics `95, Maastricht.
D. Thalmann, Virtual Sensors: A Key Tool for the Artificial Life of Virtual Actors, Proc. Pacific Graphics `95, Seoul, Korea.
O.Renault, N. Magnenat-Thalmann, D. Thalmann, A Vision-based Approach to Behavioural Animation, Journal of Visualization and Computer Animation, Vol.1, No1, 1990
H. Noser, O. Renault, D. Thalmann, N. Magnenat Thalmann, Navigation for Digital Actors based on Synthetic Vision, Memory and Learning, Computers and Graphics, Pergamon Press
R. Boulic, H. Noser, D. Thalmann, Vision-based Human Free-Walking on Sparse Foothold Locations, Proc. Fourth Eurographics Workshop on Animation and Simulation, Barcelone, Espagne, Septembre 1993, pp.173-191.
R. Boulic, H. Noser, D. Thalmann, Automatic Derivation of Human Curved Walking Trajectories from Synthetic Vision, Proc. Computer Animation '94, IEEE Computer Society Press, 1994, pp.93-103.