Rachel McDonnell

I am a Lecturer in Creative Technologies in Trinity College Dublin. I am also researching in the Graphics, Vision, and Visualisation Group.

My research work to date has revolved around conducting perceptual experiments and implementing the results in real-time graphics systems. The aim is not only to directly guide computer graphics systems into creating more efficient and plausible simulations, but also to gain important knowledge on human perception of animated virtual characters. I have conducted a large body of work on the perception of virtual characters in crowds, which has guided my technical contributions in creating more varied crowd simulations. My current research direction is to investigate interactions with characters at a high cognitive and emotional level, with particular focus on facial perception, animation and rendering.

I completed my PhD thesis in 2007 entitled “Realistic Crowd Animation: A Perceptual Approach”. In 2009, I won a postdoctoral award from the Centre for Women in Science and Engineering Research in Trinity, which was used to assist collaboration with the Robotics Institute in Carnegie Mellon University and the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics.

More recently, I won a postdoctoral innovation bursary to fund an independent project on the perceptual analysis of facial performance capture.