Whoah, that's so awesome. The M&M Man manipulation is nuts.
Jeff Han demos something really similar -- almost to the T -- in his TED presentation of the Microsoft Surface technology. He even mentions "the mesh," which leads me to wonder if it's the same rigid-as-possible approach. See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QKh1Rv0PlOQ at around 7:30.
Nitpick #2, Jeff Han references that he's implementing this rigid as possible paper at about 8:20. Jeff is a big fan of research and implements a lot of existing techniques invented by others in his demos.
I work in the same lab as Tomer who did this paper, Big Ups Tomer!
Adobe After Effects CS3 uses the algorithm or something very very similar in it's Puppet tool. I used it quite extensively last summer doing this animation for the Heinz "Top This" commercial competition.
This is mindblowingly great. I guess it goes to show how intuitive [physical] models can be if you choose the right thing [energy function] to do [to minimize], and design an algorithm to successfully do so.
It's beautiful that they chose rigidity too -- it is an extremely natural behavior that most biological things would default to. And it's great fun to play with!
The video is quite cool, but I'd be much more impressed by a link to a paper describing the algorithm in detail. Does anyone know if/where this work has been published?
Takeo Igarashi, Tomer Moscovich, John F. Hughes, "As-Rigid-As-Possible Shape Manipulation",
ACM Transactions on Computer Graphics, Vol.24, No.3, ACM SIGGRAPH 2005, Los Angels, USA, 2005.
I was fortunate enough to get a demo of this by the people working on it at the university of Tokyo in April. Our CS class was on a study tour in Japan. The technology is really amazing, especially when used to record animations. They also had other cool stuff, like a 3D leaves/flowers/trees design tool.
Jeff Han demos something really similar -- almost to the T -- in his TED presentation of the Microsoft Surface technology. He even mentions "the mesh," which leads me to wonder if it's the same rigid-as-possible approach. See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QKh1Rv0PlOQ at around 7:30.