Publications a list of current and past topics
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Compact Facial Landmark Layouts for Performance Capture
Eduard Zell, Rachel McDonnell
Computer Graphics Forum (Eurographics), to appear 2022

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Sympathy for the digital: influence of synthetic voice on affinity, social presence and empathy for photorealistic virtual humans
Darragh Higgins, Katja Zibrek, Joao Paulo Cabral, Donal Egan, Rachel McDonnell
Computer and Graphics, to appear 2022


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Investigating How Speech And Animation Realism Influence The Perceived Personality Of Virtual Characters And Agents
Sean Thomas, Ylva Ferstl, Rachel McDonnell, Cathy Ennis
In IEEE Conference on Virtual Reality and 3D User Interfaces (IEEE VR), to appear 2022


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Proximity in VR: The Importance of Character Attractiveness and Participant Gender
Katja Zibrek, Benjamin Niay, Anne-Hélène Olivier, Ludovic Hoyet, Julien Pettré, Rachel McDonnell
IEEE Conference on Virtual Reality and 3D User Interfaces (IEEE VR), to appear 2022


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The Effect of Spatial Audio on the Virtual Representation of Personal Space
Lauren Buck, Mauricio Flores Vargas, Rachel McDonnell
IEEE VR Workshop on Sonic Interaction in Virtual Environments (SIVE), to appear 2022


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Appearance
Rachel McDonnell, Bilge Mutlu
In B. Lugrin, C. Pelachaud, D. Traum (Eds.), Handbook on Socially Interactive Agents – 20 Years of Research on Embodied Conversational Agents, Intelligent Virtual Agents, and Social Robotics, Volume 1: Methods, Behavior, Cognition (pp. 107-146). ACM books


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How to train your dog: Neural enhancement of quadruped animations
Donal Egan, George Fletcher, Yiguo Qiao, Darren Cosker, Rachel McDonnell
ACM Conference on Motion, Interaction, and Games (MIG), Article No: 5, 1-7, 2021


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Does Synthetic Voice alter Social Response to a Photorealistic Character in Virtual Reality?
Katja Zibrek, Joao P. Cabral, Rachel McDonnell
ACM Conference on Motion, Interaction, and Games (MIG), to appear 2021


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The effect of audio-visual smiles on social influence in a cooperative Human-Agent Interaction task
Ilaria Torre, Emma Carrigan, Katarina Domijan, Rachel McDonnell and Naomi Harte
ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (TOCHI), Volume 28, Issue 6, Article No: 44, 1--38, 2021


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Mirror, Mirror on My Phone: Investigating Dimensions of Self-Face Perception Induced by Augmented Reality Filters
Rebecca Fribourg, Etienne Peillard, Rachel McDonnell
IEEE International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality (ISMAR), pp. 470-478, 2021


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Human or Robot? Investigating voice, appearance and gesture motion realism of conversational social agents
Ylva Ferstl, Sean Thomas, Cedric Guiard, Cathy Ennis, Rachel McDonnell
ACM International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVA), (Best Paper - Honorable Mention), Article No.12, 2021


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Remotely Perceived: Investigating the Influence of Valence on Self-Perception and Social Experience for Dyadic Video-Conferencing with Personalized Avatars
Darragh Higgins, Rebecca Fribourg, Rachel McDonnell
Frontiers in Virtual Reality, Volume 2, Issue 60, 2021


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Model for predicting perception of facial action unit activation using virtual humans
Rachel McDonnell, Katja Zibrek, Emma Carrigan and Rozenn Dahyot
Elsevier Computers & Graphics, MIG Special Section, volume 100, 81--92, 2021


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Ascending from the valley: Can state-of-the-art photorealism avoid the uncanny?
Darragh Higgins, Donal Egan, Rebecca Fribourg, Benjamin R. Cowan, Rachel McDonnell
ACM Symposium on Applied Perception (SAP), Article No. 7, pp 1-5, 2021


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Evaluating Study Design and Strategies for Mitigating the Impact of Hand Tracking Loss
Ylva Ferstl, Rachel McDonnell and Michael Neff
ACM Symposium on Applied Perception (SAP), Article No: 3, 1--12, September 2021


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Facial feature manipulation for trait portrayal in realistic and cartoon-rendered characters
Ylva Ferstl, Michael McKay and Rachel McDonnell
ACM Transactions on Applied Perception (TAP), Volume 18, Issue 4, Article No.: 22, pp 1–8, 2021


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ExpressGesture: Expressive gesture generation from speech through database matching
Ylva Ferstl, Michael Neff, Rachel McDonnell
Computer Animation and Virtual Worlds, CASA Special Edition, 2021


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It's A Match! Gesture Generation Using Expressive Parameter Matching
Ylva Ferstl, Michael Neff, Rachel McDonnell
AAMAS '21: Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and MultiAgent Systems, pp 1495–1497, 2021


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Dimensional perception of a ‘smiling McGurk effect’
Ilaria Torre, Simon Holk, Emma Carrigan, Iolanda Leite, Rachel McDonnell and Naomi Harte
International Conference on Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction (ACII), to appear 2021


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Enlighten Me: Importance of brightness and shadow for character emotion and appeal
Pisut Wisessing, Katja Zibrek, Douglas W. Cunningham, John Dingliana, Rachel McDonnell
ACM Transactions on Graphics, Volume 39, Issue 3, Article No. 19, 2020


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Adversarial gesture generation with realistic gesture phasing
Ylva Ferstl, Michael Neff, Rachel McDonnell
Computers and Graphics, Volume 89, pp. 117-130, 2020


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Developing a Multi-modal Embodied Virtual Agent with Realistic Appearance and Emotional Response for Games
Rachel McDonnell, Edvinas Teiserskis, Emer Gilmartin, Cedric Guiard, Gerard Lacey
In MIG '20: Proceedings of the ACM SIGGRAPH Conference on Motion, Interaction and Games, to appear, 2020


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Understanding the Predictability of Gesture Parameters from Speech and their Perceptual Importance
Ylva Ferstl, Michael Neff, Rachel McDonnell
International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVA), to appear, 2020


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Investigating perceptually based models to predict importance of facial blendshapes
Emma Carrigan, Katja Zibrek, Rozenn Dahyot, Rachel McDonnell
In MIG '20: Proceedings of the ACM SIGGRAPH Conference on Motion, Interaction and Games (Best Short Paper Award), to appear, 2020


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From Perception to Interaction with Virtual Characters
Eduard Zell, Katja Zibrek, Xueni Pan, Marco Gillies, Rachel McDonnell
Eurographics Tutorial, 2020


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Expression Packing: As-Few-As-Possible Training Expressions for Blendshape Transfer
Emma Carrigan, Eduard Zell, Cedric Guiard, Rachel McDonnell
Computer Graphics Forum (Eurographics), Volume 39, Issue 2, pp. 219-233, 2020


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The effect of gender and attractiveness of motion on proximity in virtual reality
Katja Zibrek, Benjamin Niay, Anne-Helene Olivier, Ludovic Hoyet, Julien Pettre and Rachel McDonnell
ACM Transactions on Applied Perception (Best Paper - Honorable mention), Article No.: 14, pp 1–15, 2020


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Evalu-light: A practical approach for evaluating character lighting in real-time
Pisut Wisessing and Rachel McDonnell
ACM Symposium on Applied Perception, Article No. 17, 2020


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Walk this way: Evaluating the effect of perceived gender and attractiveness of motion on proximity in virtual reality
Katja Zibrek, Benjamin Niay, Anne-Helene Olivier, Ludovic Hoyet, Julien Pettre and Rachel McDonnell
IEEE Conference on Virtual Reality and 3D User Interfaces Abstracts and Workshops (VRW), pp. 169-170, 2020


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Perception of Virtual Characters
Eduard Zell, Katja Zibrek, Rachel McDonnell
SIGGRAPH Course 2019


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A phychophysical model to control the brightness and key-to-fill ratio in CG cartoon character lighting
Pisut Wisessing, Katja Zibrek, Douglas Cunningham, Rachel McDonnell
In SAP '19: Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on Applied Perception, Article No. 2, 2019


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Is photorealism important for perception of expressive virtual humans in VR?
Katja Zibrek, Sean Martin, Rachel McDonnell
ACM Transactions on Applied Perception (Best Paper Award), 16 (3), Article No. 14, 2019


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Multi-objective adversarial gesture generation
Ylva Ferstl, Michael Neff, Rachel McDonnell
In MIG '19: Proceedings of the ACM SIGGRAPH Conference on Motion, Interaction and Games, Article No. 3, pp. 1-10, 2019


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Social presence and place illusion are affected by photorealism in embodied VR
Katja Zibrek, Rachel McDonnell
In MIG '19: Proceedings of the ACM SIGGRAPH Conference on Motion, Interaction and Games, Article No. 13, pp. 1-7, 2019


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The Effect of Multimodal Emotional Expression and Agent Appearance on Trust in Human-Agent Interaction
Ilaria Torre, Emma Carrigan, Rachel McDonnell, Katarina Domijan, Killian McCabe, Naomi Harte
In MIG '19: Proceedings of the ACM SIGGRAPH Conference on Motion, Interaction and Games, Article No. 14, pp. 1-6, 2019


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A perceptual study on the manipulation of facial features for trait portrayal in virtual agents
Ylva Ferstl, Rachel McDonnell
International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVA), pp. 281-288, 2018


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Investigating the use of recurrent motion modelling for speech gesture generation
Ylva Ferstl, Rachel McDonnell
International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVA), pp. 93-98, 2018


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Survival at the museum: A cooperation experiment with emotionally expressive avatars
Ilaria Torre, Emma Carrigan, Killian McCabe, Rachel McDonnell, Naomi Harte
International Conference on Multimodal Interaction (ICMI), pp. 423-427, 2018


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A Preliminary Investigation into the Impact of Training for Example-Based Facial Blendshape Creation
Emma Carrigan, Ludovic Hoyet, Rachel McDonnell, Quentin Avril
In Eurographics Short Papers, pp. 49-52, 2018


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The Effect of Realistic Appearance of Virtual Characters in Immersive Environments - Does the Character’s Personality Play a Role?
Katja Zibrek, Elena Kokkinara, Rachel McDonnell
IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, 99, 1-1, 2018


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Data-Driven Approach to Synthesizing Facial Animation Using Motion Capture
Kerstin Ruhland, Mukta Prasad, Rachel McDonnell
IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, 37 (4), 30-41, 2017


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Facial features of non-player creatures can influence moral decisions in video games
Ylva Ferstl, Elena Kokkinara, Rachel McDonnell
ACM Transactions on Applied Perception, 15 (1), Article No. 4, 2017


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Don't Stand So Close To Me: Investigating the effect of control on the appeal of virtual humans using immersion and a proximity-based behavioral task
Katja Zibrek, Elena Kokkinara, Rachel McDonnell
In SAP '17: Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on Applied Perception, Article No. 3, 2017


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The Influence of Synthetic Voice on the Evaluation of a Virtual Character
Joao Cabral, Benjamin Cowan, Katja Zibrek, Rachel McDonnell
In Interspeech 2017, pp 229 - 233, 2017


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Automatic gesture generation for virtual humans with deep temporal learning
Ylva Ferstl, Rachel McDonnell
In VSI '17: 3rd Workshop on Virtual Social Interaction


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Evaluating the response to virtual characters by using a social behavioral task
Katja Zibrek, Elena Kokkinara, Rachel McDonnell
In VSI '17: 3rd Int. Workshop on Virtual Social Interaction


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Crowd appearance affects player performance in game combat scenarios
Emma Carrigan, Elena Kokkinara, Florian Gheorghe, Maxime Houlier, Stephane Donikian, Rachel McDonnell
In MIG '16: Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Motion in Games, pp 187 - 192, 2016


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Improving blendshape performance for crowds with GPU and GPGPU Techniques
Timothy Costigan, Anton Gerdelan, Emma Carrigan, Rachel McDonnell
In MIG '16: Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Motion in Games, pp 73 - 78, 2016


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Perception of lighting and shading for animated virtual characters
Pisut Wisessing, John Dingliana, Rachel McDonnell
In SAP '16: Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on Applied Perception, pp 25-29, 2016


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Do I trust you, abstract creature? a study on personality perception of abstract virtual faces
Ylva Ferstl, Elena Kokkinara, Rachel McDonnell
In SAP '16: Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on Applied Perception, pp 39-43, 2016


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To Stylize or not to Stylize? Effect of Shape and Material Stylization on the Perception of Computer Generated Faces
Eduard Zell, Carlos Aliaga, Adrian Jarabo, Katja Zibrek, Diego Gutierrez, Rachel McDonnell, Mario Botsch
ACM Transactions on Graphics (SIGGRAPH Asia 2015), 34,(6), Article No. 184, 2015


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Animation Realism Affects Perceived Character Appeal of a Self-Virtual Face
Elena Kokkinara, Rachel McDonnell
In MIG '15: Proceedings of the ACM conference on Motion in Games, pp 221-226, 2015


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Perception of personality through eye gaze of realistic and cartoon models
Kerstin Ruhland, Katja Zibrek, Rachel McDonnell
In SAP '15: Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on Applied Perception, pp 19-23, 2015


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The Effect of Animation Realism on Face Ownership and Engagement
Elena Kokkinara, Rachel McDonnell
In FAA '15: Proceedings of Facial Analysis, and Animation, Article No. 11, 2015


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Speech independent emotion transfer for virtual faces
Timothy Costigan, Rachel McDonnell
In FAA '15: Proceedings of Facial Analysis, and Animation, Article No. 10, 2015


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Exploring the Effect of Motion Type and Emotions on the Perception of Gender in Virtual Humans
Katja Zibrek, Ludovic Hoyet, Kerstin Ruhland, Rachel McDonnell
ACM Transactions on Applied Perception, 12 (3), Article No. 11, 2015


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A review of eye gaze in virtual agents, social robots and HCI: Behaviour generation, user interaction and perception
Kerstin Ruhland, Christopher E. Peters, Sean Andrist, Jeremy B. Badler, Norman I. Badler, Michael Gleicher, Bilge Mutlu, Rachel McDonnell
Computer Graphics Forum, 34, (6), pp 299-326, 2015


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Facial Retargeting using Neural Networks
Timothy Costigan, Mukta Prasad, Rachel McDonnell
In MIG '14: Proceedings of the ACM SIGGRAPH Conference on Motion in Games, pp 31-38 2014


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Does render style affect perception of personality in virtual humans?
Katja Zibrek, Rachel McDonnell
In SAP '14: Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on Applied Perception, pp 111-115, 2014


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Look me in the eyes: A survey of eye and gaze animation for virtual agents and artificial systems
Kerstin Ruhland, Sean Andrist, Jeremy B. Badler, Christopher E. Peters, Norman I. Badler, Michael Gleicher, Bilge Mutlu, Rachel McDonnell
In Eurographics State-of-the-Art Reports (EG '14 STARs), pp 69-91, 2014


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Emotion Capture: Emotionally Expressive Characters for Games
Cathy Ennis, Ludovic Hoyet, Arjan Egges, Rachel McDonnell
In MIG '13: Proceedings of the ACM SIGGRAPH Conference on Motion in Games, pp 53-60, 2013


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Evaluating the Effect of Emotion on Gender Recognition in Virtual Humans
Katja Zibrek, Ludovic Hoyet, Kerstin Ruhland, Rachel McDonnell
In SAP '13: Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on Applied Perception, pp 45-49, 2013


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Render me Real? Investigating the Effect of Render Style on the Perception of Animated Virtual Humans
Rachel McDonnell, Martin Breidt, Heinrich Buelthoff
ACM Transaction on Graphics (SIGGRAPH 2012), 31, (4), 91:1-91:11, 2012


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Push it Real: Perceiving Causality in Virtual Interactions
Ludovic Hoyet, Rachel McDonnell, Carol O'Sullivan
ACM Transaction on Graphics (SIGGRAPH 2012), 31, (4), 90:1-90:9, 2012


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Sleight of Hand: Perception of finger motion from reduced marker sets
Ludovic Hoyet, Kenneth Ryall, Rachel McDonnell, Carol O'Sullivan
In Proceedings of ACM SIGGRAPH Symposium on Interactive 3D Graphics and Games, I3D, pp. 79-86, 2012


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Appealing Virtual Humans
Rachel McDonnell
In Proceedings of Motion in Games, MIG, pp. 102-111, 2012


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Seeing is Believing: Body Motion Dominates in Multisensory Conversations
Cathy Ennis, Rachel McDonnell, Carol O'Sullivan
ACM Transactions on Graphics (SIGGRAPH 2010), 29, (4), 91:1 - 91:9, 2010


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Movements and voices affect perceived sex of virtual conversers
Rachel McDonnell, Carol O'Sullivan
In APGV '10: Proceedings of the symposium on Applied Perception in Graphics and Visualisation, pp. 125-128, 2010


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Face Reality: Investigating the Uncanny Valley for virtual faces
Rachel McDonnell, Martin Breidt
In Proceedings of the SIGGRAPH Asia 2010 Conference on Sketches & Applications, Article No. 41, 2010


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Perceptual Evaluation of Human Animation Timewarping
Martin Prazak, Rachel McDonnell, Carol O'Sullivan
In Proceedings of the SIGGRAPH Asia 2010 Conference on Sketches & Applications, Article No.30, 2010


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Facial animation for real-time conversing groups
Rachel McDonnell
In Proceedings of the ACM/SSPNET Symposium on Facial Analysis and Animation, p13, 2010


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Eye-catching Crowds: Saliency based Selective Variation
Rachel McDonnell, Micheal Larkin, Benjamin Hernandez, Isaac Rudomin, and Carol O'Sullivan
ACM Transactions on Graphics (SIGGRAPH 2009), 28, (3), 55:1 - 55:10, 2009


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Talking Bodies: Sensitivity to De-synchronization of Conversations
Rachel McDonnell, Cathy Ennis, Simon Dobbyn, and Carol O'Sullivan



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Investigating the role of body shape on the perception of emotion
Rachel McDonnell, Sophie Joerg, Joanna McHugh, Fiona Newell, Carol O'Sullivan
ACM Transactions on Applied Perception, 6 (3), 14:1 - 14:11, 2009


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Evaluating the effect of motion and body shape on the perceived sex of virtual characters.
Rachel McDonnell, Sophie Joerg, Jessica K. Hodgins, Fiona Newell, and Carol O'Sullivan
ACM Transactions on Applied Perception, 5, (4), 20:1-20:14, 2009


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A perception based metric for comparing human motion.
Martin Prazak, Rachel McDonnell, Ladislav Kavan, and Carol O'Sullivan
Eurographics Ireland Workshop, pp. 75-80. 2009 (shared best paper award)


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Perceiving emotion in crowds: the role of dynamic body postures on the perception of emotion in crowded scenes
Joanna Edel McHugh, Rachel McDonnell, Carol O'Sullivan, and Fiona Newell
Experimental Brain Research, 204 (3), 361-372, 2009


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Clone Attack! Perception of Crowd Variety
Rachel McDonnell, Micheal Larkin, Simon Dobbyn, Steven Collins, Carol O'Sullivan
ACM Transactions on Graphics (SIGGRAPH 2008), 27, (3), 26:1 - 26:8, 2008


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Evaluating the emotional content of human motions on real and virtual characters
Rachel McDonnell, Sophie Joerg, Joanna McHugh, Fiona Newell, Carol O'Sullivan
In APGV '08: Proceedings of the symposium on Applied Perception in Graphics and Visualisation, pp. 67-74


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Crowds in Context: Evaluating the Perceptual Plausibility of Pedestrian Orientation
Christopher Peters, Cathy Ennis, Rachel McDonnell, Carol O'Sullivan
Eurographics Short Papers, pp. 227-230, 2008


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Pipeline for Populating Games with Realistic Crowds
Rachel McDonnell, Simon Dobbyn, Carol O'Sullivan
International Journal of Intelligent Games and Simulation, Volume 4, Number 2, pp. 1-15, 2007


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Smooth Movers: Perceptually Guided Human Motion Simulation
Rachel McDonnell, Fiona Newell, Carol O'Sullivan.
In Proceedings of ACM SIGGRAPH/Eurographics Symposium on Computer Animation, pp. 259-269, 2007


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Virtual Shapers & Movers: Form and Motion affect Sex Perception
Rachel McDonnell, Sophie Joerg, Jessica Hodgins, Fiona Newell, Carol O'Sullivan
In APGV '07: Proceedings of the symposium on Applied Perception in Graphics and Visualisation, pp. 7-10, 2007


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Skinning Arbitrary Deformations
Ladislav Kavan, Rachel McDonnell, Simon Dobbyn, Jiri Zara, Carol O'Sullivan
In Proceedings of ACM SIGGRAPH Symposium on Interactive 3D Graphics and Games, I3D, pp. 53-60 2007


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Populating Virtual Environments with Crowds
Daniel Thalmann, Carol O'Sullivan, Barbara Yersin, Jonathan Maim, Rachel McDonnell
Eurographics Tutorials, vol. 1, pp. 25-124, 2007


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Perceptual Evaluation of LOD Clothing for Virtual Humans
Rachel McDonnell, Simon Dobbyn, Steven Collins, Carol O'Sullivan.
ACM SIGGRAPH/Eurographics Symposium on Computer Animation, pp. 117-126, 2006


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Crowd Creation Pipeline for Games
Rachel McDonnell, Simon Dobbyn, Carol O'Sullivan
In Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Computer Games, CGames 2006, pp. 183-190, 2006 (Best paper award)


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Clothing The Masses: Real-Time Clothed Crowds With Variation
Simon Dobbyn, Rachel McDonnell, Steven Collins, Ladislav Kavan, Carol O'Sullivan
Eurographics Short Papers, pp. 103-106, 2006


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Animating Dolly: Real-time Herding and Rendering of Sheep
Ljiljana Skrba, Simon Dobbyn, Rachel McDonnell, Carol O'Sullivan
In Proceedings of Eurographics Ireland Workshop, pp. 7-12, 2006


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Perceptual Evaluation of Impostor Representations for Virtual Humans and Buildings
John Hamill, Rachel McDonnell, Simon Dobbyn, Carol O'Sullivan
Computer Graphics Forum 24(3), Eurographics, pp. 623-633, 2005


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Perceptually Adaptive Graphics
Carol O'Sullivan, Sarah Howlett, Yann Morvan, Rachel McDonnell, Keith O'Conor
Eurographics State of the Art reports, pp. 141-164, 2004


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LOD Human Representations: A Comparative Study
Rachel McDonnell, Simon Dobbyn, Carol O'Sullivan
In Proceeding of the First International Workshop on Crowd Simulation, pp. 101-115, 2005


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Application of the Golden Ratio to 3D Facial Models
Rachel McDonnell and Ann McNamara
Proceedings Eurographics Ireland, pp. 35-42, 2003