I have moved on to the BBC as of September 2007. While I was with UCL, I completed a part-time PhD (Viva: 21st June 2006) titled Participant Responses to Virtual Agents in Immersive Virtual Environments. I was supervised by Prof. Mel Slater and my second supervisor was Dr. Anthony Steed. During that time, I also worked as a research fellow on EQUATOR, an Interdisciplinary Research Collaboration (IRC) project, supported by the EPSRC (GR/N15986/01)
I then continued to work as a postdoctoral research fellow on creating expressive virtual characters within the EyeCatching (EPSRC EP/E010032/1) project, which was being carried out collaboratively with two other research groups in the UK
An overall view of my doctoral studies has been represented on http://www.cs.ucl.ac.uk/staff/v.vinayagamoorthy/Research/. The linked pages won the runner-up prize in the 2005 UCL Computer Science departmental doctoral research web pages competition sponsored by Searchspace. The research was intended to explore techniques in adding behaviour realism to virtual humans, which is one of the more challenging problems in computer graphics.
My studies were being carried out under the Virtual Environments and Computer Graphics research theme within the Vision Imaging and Virtual Environments research group at University College London (UCL).
Mostly my research revolves around the question of: “What gives an Avatar life?”
University College London, Department of Computer Science
