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Professor Rachel Mc Donnell

Professor In (Computer Science)
Non College Properties
      
Profile Photo

Professor Rachel Mc Donnell

Professor In (Computer Science)
Non College Properties

 ramcdonn@tcd.ie

 3531896 8436


  Computer & Video Games   Computer Animation   Computer Graphics   Computer Graphics & Vision   Computer Science   HUMAN COMPUTER INTERACTION
Project Title
 RADICal: on-set virtual Reality for Actors portraying DIgital Characters
From
September 2021
To
September 2025
Summary
The main aim of this project will be to transform the traditional approaches for face and body capture of film actors, using real-time motion capture and Virtual Reality (VR) to allow them to visualize their virtual faces and bodies from a first-person perspective, live on-set. We hypothesize that this will greatly enhance their performances and overall satisfaction in playing the role of a virtual character. The main novelty of our approach is incorporating actor methods and practices into the technical algorithms for motion tracking and mapping and conducting neuroscience experiments to enhance the illusory perception that a virtual body or body-part is the actors own.
Funding Agency
Science Foundation Ireland
Programme
Frontiers for the Future
Project Type
Research
Project Title
 Game Face: Perceptually Optimised Real-Time Facial Animation
From
2014
To
2019
Summary
The main aim of this project will be to transform the typical facial animation pipeline used for games, by considering user perception at each of the steps from motion capture and expression transfer to deformation, and real-time display. Our result will be a perceptually optimised pipeline that will balance computation with realism, plausibility, and emotional expressiveness of virtual facial animation.
Funding Agency
Science Foundation Ireland
Programme
Career Development Award
Project Type
Research
Project Title
 Cartoon Motion: Stylised facial animation from motion capture
From
2013
To
2017
Summary
A skilled 3D animator can create the same expressiveness in virtual characters that is commonly found in traditional animation. However, this process can be very time consuming and expensive. In this novel project, we aim to address this issue by developing tools to automatically create motion that captures the idiosyncrasies of the human actor, yet incorporates artistic stylizations.
Funding Agency
Science Foundation Ireland
Programme
Investigator Programme
Project Type
Investigator Project
Person Months
36

Details Date
Advisory board for Eurographics 2022
Associate Editor for ACM Transactions on Applied Perception 2013-current
Associate Editor for the Journal of Eurographics, the European Association for Computer Graphics (Computer Graphics Forum) 2014, 2021
Editorial board for Frontiers in Virtual Reality Journal. 2019
Eurographics Program Committee Member 2012
External Examiner for PhD defence at INRIA, Rennes, France. 2022
Program Chair for Symposium on Applied Perception in Graphics and Visualization, Los Angeles, U.S.A. 2012
ACM SIGGRAPH Program Committee Member 2014
Acted as the external examiner for CGI Technical Artist Apprenticeship in Technical University Dublin. Examined all the student coursework and attended Exam Board meeting to give feedback on the apprenticeship. 2021
External Examiner for PhD defence at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. 2021
Program Committee Member for ACM SIGGRAPH Symposium on Applied Perception 2009
ACM SIGGRAPH Asia Program Committee Member 2021
Program Committee Member for CASA: Computer Animation and Social Agents conference 2012
Program Committee Member for ACM SIGGRAPH Conference on Motion in Games 2012
Program Committee Member for ACM SIGGRAPH/Eurographics Symposium on Computer Animation 2009
External Examiner for PhD defence at Brandenburg University of Technology Cottbus - Senftenberg 2020
Program Committee Member for IEEE VR 2019
Program Committee Member for ACM SIGGRAPH Interactive 3D Graphics and Games (I3D) 2018
ACM SIGGRAPH Asia Sketches and Posters Program Committee Member 2010
Language Skill Reading Skill Writing Skill Speaking
English Fluent Fluent Fluent
French Basic Basic Basic
Irish Medium Basic Medium
Details Date From Date To
Association for Computing Machinery
Schwartz, Rachael and Mullery, Mark and Dingliana, John and McDonnell, Rachel, Computational topology for hand-drawn animation technology: A survey, Computers and Graphics, 129, 2025, Notes: [Cited by: 1], Journal Article, PUBLISHED  DOI
Connolly, Rose and Buck, Lauren and Zordan, Victor and Mcdonnell, Rachel, The Impact of Navigation on Proxemics in an Immersive Virtual Environment with Conversational Agents, IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, 31, (5), 2025, p2787 â€" 2797 , Notes: [Cited by: 0], Journal Article, PUBLISHED  DOI
Wisessing, P. and Mcdonnell, R., Blinded by the light: Does portrait lighting design affect perception of realistic virtual humans?, 2024, Notes: [cited By 0], Conference Paper, PUBLISHED  DOI
Jovane, A. and Egan, D. and Vargas, M.F. and Mythen, S. and McDonnell, R., Virtual Animal Embodiment for Actor Training, 2024, pp428-431 , Notes: [cited By 0], Conference Paper, PUBLISHED  DOI
D Higgins, R McDonnell, JM Normand, R Fribourg, Priming and personality effects on the Sense of Embodiment for human and non-human avatars in Virtual Reality, International Conference on Artificial Reality and Telexistence Eurographics Symposium on Virtual Environments, Japan, 2024, Conference Paper, PUBLISHED  TARA - Full Text  DOI
Donal Egan, Alberto Jovane, Jan Szkaradek, George Fletcher, Darren Cosker, Rachel McDonnell, Dog Code: Human to Quadruped Embodiment using Shared Codebooks, Proceedings of the 17th ACM SIGGRAPH Conference on Motion, Interaction, and Games, USA, 2024, 2024, Conference Paper, PUBLISHED  TARA - Full Text  DOI  URL
Bigioi, D. and Basak, S. and StypuÅ'kowski, M. and Zieba, M. and Jordan, H. and McDonnell, R. and Corcoran, P., Speech driven video editing via an audio-conditioned diffusion model, Image and Vision Computing, 142, (104911), 2024, Notes: [cited By 1], Journal Article, PUBLISHED  DOI
Casey, L. and Dooley, J. and Codd, M. and Dahyot, R. and Cognetti, M. and Mullarkey, T. and Redmond, P. and Lacey, G., A real-time digital twin for active safety in an aircraft hangar, Frontiers in Virtual Reality, 5, (1372923), 2024, Notes: [cited By 0], Journal Article, PUBLISHED  DOI
He, Y. and Buck, L. and Rooney, B. and McDonnell, R., Effect of Avatar Clothing and User Personality on Group Dynamics in Virtual Reality, (19), 2023, Notes: [cited By 0], Conference Paper, PUBLISHED  DOI
Buck, L. and Young, G.W. and McDonnell, R., Avatar Customization, Personality, and the Perception of Work Group Inclusion in Immersive Virtual Reality, 2023, pp27-32 , Notes: [cited By 0], Conference Paper, PUBLISHED  DOI
  

Page 1 of 13
Appearance in, editor(s)B. Lugrin, C. Pelachaud, D. Traum , Handbook on Socially Interactive Agents, New York, United States, Association for Computing Machinery, 2021, [Rachel McDonnell, Bilge Mutlu], Book Chapter, PUBLISHED
Eduard Zell, Katja Zibrek, Xueni Pan, Marco Gillies, Rachel McDonnell, From Perception to Interaction with Virtual Characters, Eurographics 2020 - Tutorials, 2020, Review Article, PUBLISHED
McHugh, J.E., McDonnell, R., Chan, J.S. & Newell, F.N., The Multisensory Perception of Emotions in Real and Virtual Humans, British Psychological Society Annual Conference 2008, Dublin, April 2008, 2008, Poster, PRESENTED
Daniel Thalmann, Carol O'Sullivan, Barbara Yersin, Jonathan Maim, Rachel McDonnell, Populating Virtual Environments with Crowds, Eurographics Tutorials, 2007, Conference Paper, PUBLISHED

  


Award Date
Best Conference Paper at IEEE VR 2022
Graphics Replicability Stamp Initiative (GRSI) best paper award 2022
Best Paper Honorable Mention at ACM International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVA) 2021
Selected as on of the top 5 papers at ACM Symposium on Applied Perception 2021
Fellowship, Trinity College Dublin 2020
Best Short Paper Award at ACM SIGGRAPH Conference on Motion, Interaction, and Games 2020
Best Paper Honorable Mention at ACM Symposium on Applied Perception 2020
Best Paper Award at ACM Symposium on Applied Perception 2019
Best paper award (top 5) at ACM SIGGRAPH Conference on Motion in Games 2013
Career Development Award (SFI) 2013
Creating virtual replicas of human beings, in both appearance and motion, is one of the greatest challenges in the field of Computer Graphics and beyond. My main research direction involves advancing the state-of-the-art in virtual humans, a highly competitive field with large investment from the top tech companies (Microsoft, Google, Meta, etc.). However, I am credited with a unique approach of using human perception to deepen our understanding of virtual humans and improve the technological advancements. I have made a significant impact by exploring the use of novel experiments to understand human perception of virtual beings. In particular, how photorealism can influence higher level concepts such as perceived emotion, personality, and trustworthiness. My work has been published at the top venues (including ACM TOG, TOCHI, TAP, CGF, CAG, IEEE VR, ISMAR, IVA, MIG, SAP since my last promotion) and I secured >€2.5M in research funding (€1.3M since my last promotion). I am a recognised world leader in virtual human research, as evidenced by an industry award of $85K from Epic Games, to collaborate on using perception to improve their high-fidelity 'Metahumans'. I also gave masterclasses on perception of virtual humans at Eurographics (Tutorial, 2020) and SIGGRAPH (Course, 2019). I am also a leader in embodied virtual human research, and credited as the first to use adversarial networks for automating the gesture behaviours of virtual agents. Our system is recognised as one of the current leading systems in AI gesture generation (cited 55 times since 2020). I have also been awarded funding from EI to investigate commercial feasibility and was invited as a leading expert to co-author a chapter in the ACM Handbook on Socially Interactive Agents. Finally, our Trinity-Speech-Gesture dataset was licensed to Electronic Arts Inc., who recognised the dataset as the gold-standard for speech-to-gesture systems.