A versatile joystick for animation artists

Remember those molecule models made from sticks and balls you could assemble to study complex molecules back in school? Something similar has taken shape in the Interactive Geometry Lab at ETH Zurich. ETH-professor Olga Sorkine-Hornung and her team do not study molecules but ways to manipulate virtual shapes, like animated characters on a computer screen. Now they have developed an input device or "joystick" to move and pose virtual characters, made up – similar to the molecule models – of modular building blocks. An artist can assemble these blocks into an approximate representation of any virtual character, be it a human, a dog or an elephant or even just single body parts like arms or a hand.

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