Dr. Rachel Mc Donnell
Associate Professor, Computer Science
Publications and Further Research Outputs
Peer-Reviewed Publications
Peña, P.R. and Doyle, P.R. and Ip, E.Y. and Di Liberto, G. and Higgins, D. and McDonnell, R. and Branigan, H. and Gustafson, J. and McMillan, D. and Moore, R.J. and Cowan, B.R., A Special Interest Group on Developing Theories of Language Use in Interaction with Conversational User Interfaces, (509), 2023
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
Basak, S. and Khan, F. and Javidnia, H. and Corcoran, P. and McDonnell, R. and Schukat, M., C3I-SynFace: A synthetic head pose and facial depth dataset using seed virtual human models., Data in Brief, 48, (109087), 2023
Vargas, M.F. and Fribourg, R. and Bates, E. and McDonnell, R., Now I Wanna Be a Dog: Exploring the Impact of Audio and Tactile Feedback on Animal Embodiment, 2023, pp912-921
Young, G. W., O'Dwyer, N., Vargas, M. F., Donnell, R. M., & Smolic, A., Feel the Music Audience Experiences of Audio Tactile Feedback in a Novel Virtual Reality Volumetric Music Video., Arts, 156, 2023, p1-22
Jordan, H. and Buck, L. and Shinde, P. and McDonnell, R., What's My Age Again? Exploring the Impact of Age on the Enfacement of Current State-of-the-Art Avatars, 2023, pp865-866
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
Higgins, D. and Zhan, Y. and Cowan, B.R. and McDonnell, R., Investigating the effect of visual realism on empathic responses to emotionally expressive virtual humans, (5), 2023
Egan, D. and Cosker, D. and McDonnell, R., NeuroDog: Quadruped Embodiment using Neural Networks, Proceedings of the ACM on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques, 6, (3), 2023
Peña, P.R. and Doyle, P.R. and Garaialde, D. and Wu, Y. and McDonnell, R. and Cowan, B.R., Human Speakers Help Machine Listeners to account for Visual Asymmetries in Dialogue, (9), 2023
Carol O'Sullivan, State of the art in telepresence, ACM SIGGRAPH 2022 Courses, 2022
Vladimir Marochko, Richard Reilly, Rachel McDonnell, Luca Longo, A Survey on the Application of Virtual Reality in Event-Related Potential Research, Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics), 13480 LNCS, 2022, p256-269
Lauren Buck, Rachel McDonnell, Security and Privacy in the Metaverse: The Threat of the Digital Human, British Psychological Society Annual Conference 2008, Dublin, April 2008, 2022
Darragh Higgins, Katja Zibrek, Joao P. Cabral, Donal Egan, Rachel McDonnell, Sympathy for the digital: influence of synthetic voice on affinity, social presence and empathy for photorealistic virtual humans, Computers and Graphics, 104, 2022, p116-128-
Zibrek, K. and Niay, B. and Olivier, A.-H. and Pettre, J. and Hoyet, L. and McDonnell, R., Proximity in VR: The Importance of Character Attractiveness and Participant Gender, 2022, pp672-673
Ilaria Torre, Simon Holk, Elmira Yadollahi, Iolanda Leite, Rachel McDonnell, Naomi Harte, Smiling in the Face and Voice of Avatars and Robots: Evidence for a smiling McGurk Effect, IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing, 2022, p1-12
Basak, S. and Corcoran, P. and McDonnell, R. and Schukat, M., 3D face-model reconstruction from a single image: A feature aggregation approach using hierarchical transformer with weak supervision, Neural Networks, 156, 2022, p108-122
Lauren E. Buck, Mauricio Flores Vargas, Rachel McDonnell, The Effect of Spatial Audio on the Virtual Representation of Personal Space, IEEE VR Workshop on Sonic Interactions in Virtual Environments (SIVE), 2022
Eduard Zell, Rachel McDonnell, Compact Facial Landmark Layouts for Performance Capture, Computer Graphics Forum (Eurographics), 2022
Sean Thomas, Ylva Ferstl, Rachel McDonnell, Cathy Ennis, Investigating how speech and animation realism influence the perceived personality of virtual characters and agents, IEEE Conference on Virtual Reality and 3D User Interfaces (IEEE VR) , 2022
Torre, I. and Deichler, A. and Nicholson, M. and McDonnell, R. and Harte, N., To smile or not to smile: The effect of mismatched emotional expressions in a Human-Robot cooperative task, 2022, pp8-13
Bigioi, D. and Jordan, H. and Jain, R. and Mcdonnell, R. and Corcoran, P., Pose-Aware Speech Driven Facial Landmark Animation Pipeline for Automated Dubbing, IEEE Access, 10, 2022, p133357-133369
Ilaria Torre, Simon Holk, Emma Carrigan, Iolanda Leite, Rachel McDonnell and Naomi Harte, Dimensional perception of a 'smiling McGurk effect', 9th International Conference on Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction (ACII), 2021
Katja Zibrek, Joao Cabral, Rachel McDonnell, Does Synthetic Voice alter Social Response to a Photorealistic Character in Virtual Reality?, 14th ACM SIGGRAPH Conference on Motion, Interaction and Games, 2021
Shubhajit Basak, Peter Corcoran, Faisal Khan, Rachel McDonnell, Michael Schukat, Learning 3D Head Pose From Synthetic Data: A Semi-Supervised Approach, IEEE Access, 9, 2021, p37557 - 37573
Ylva Ferstl, Rachel McDonnell, Michael Neff, Evaluating Study Design and Strategies for Mitigating the Impact of Hand Tracking Loss, ACM International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVA), 2021
George Fletcher, Yiguo Qiao, Rebecca Fribourg, Jake Deane, Rachel McDonnell, Darren Cosker, Exploring the Perception of Quadruped Motion Retargeting, ACM SIGGRAPH Conference on Motion, Interaction and Games, 2021
Basak, S. and Khan, F. and McDonnell, R. and Schukat, M., Learning Accurate Head Pose for Consumer Technology from 3D Synthetic Data, 2021-January, (9427768), 2021
Darragh Higgins, Rachel McDonnell, A Preliminary Investigation of Avatar Use in Video-Conferencing, IEEE Conference on Virtual Reality and 3D User Interfaces Abstracts and Workshops (VRW), 2021
Darragh Higgins, Rachel McDonnell, A preliminary investigation of avatar use in video-conferencing, 2021 IEEE Conference on Virtual Reality and 3D User Interfaces Abstracts and Workshops (VRW), Portugal, (9419089), 2021, pp540-541
Darragh Higgins, Donal Egan, Rebecca Fribourg, Benjamin Cowan, Rachel McDonnell, Ascending from the valley: Can state-of-the-art photorealism avoid the uncanny?, 2021
Donal Egan, George Fletcher, Yiguo Qiao, Darren Cosker, Rachel McDonnell, How to train your dog: Neural enhancement of quadruped animations, ACM SIGGRAPH Conference on Motion, Interaction and Games, 2021
Ilaria Torre, Emma Carrigan, Katarina Domijan, Rachel McDonnell, Naomi Harte, The Effect of Audio-Visual Smiles on Social Influence in a Cooperative Human-Agent Interaction Task, ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (TOCHI), 28, (6), 2021, p1-38
Ylva Ferstl, Michael McKay and Rachel McDonnell, Facial feature manipulation for trait portrayal in realistic and cartoon-rendered characters, ACM Transactions on Applied Perception (TAP),, 18, (4), 2021, p1 - 8
Rachel McDonnell, Katja Zibrek, Emma Carrigan, Rozenn Dahyot, Model for predicting perception of facial action unit activation using virtual humans, Computers and Graphics, 100, 2021, p81 - 92
Darragh Higgins, Rebecca Fribourg, Rachel McDonnell, Remotely Perceived: Investigating the Influence of Valence on Self-Perception and Social Experience for Dyadic Video-Conferencing with Personalized Avatars, Frontiers in Virtual Reality, 2, (60), 2021
Ylva Ferstl, Michael Neff, Rachel McDonnell, It's A Match! Gesture Generation Using Expressive Parameter Matching, AAMAS '21: Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and MultiAgent Systems, 2021, pp1495-1497
Ylva Ferstl, Sean Thomas, Cedric Guiard, Cathy Ennis, Rachel McDonnell, Human or Robot?: Investigating voice, appearance and gesture motion realism of conversational social agents, ACM International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVA), 2021, pp76 - 83
Ylva Ferstl, Michael Neff, Rachel McDonnell, ExpressGesture: Expressive gesture generation from speech through database matching, Computer Animation and Virtual Worlds, 32, (3-4), 2021
McDonnell, R. and Zibrek, K. and Carrigan, E. and Dahyot, R., Model for predicting perception of facial action unit activation using virtual humans[Formula presented], Computers and Graphics (Pergamon), 100, 2021, p81-92
Rebecca Fribourg, Etienne Peillard, Rachel McDonnell, Mirror, Mirror on My Phone: Investigating Dimensions of Self-Face Perception Induced by Augmented Reality Filters, IEEE International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality (ISMAR), 2021, pp470 - 478
Pisut Wisessing, Katja Zibrek, Douglas W. Cunningham, John Dingliana, Rachel McDonnell, Enlighten Me: Importance of brightness and shadow for character emotion and appeal, ACM Transactions on Graphics, 39, (3), 2020
Rachel McDonnell, Edvinas Teiserskis, Emer Gilmartin, Cédric Guiard, Gerard Lacey, Developing a Multi-modal Embodied Virtual Agent with Realistic Appearance and Emotional Response for Games, ACM Conference on Motion, Interaction, and Games, 2020
Ylva Ferstl, Michael Neff, Rachel McDonnell, Understanding the Predictability of Gesture Parameters from Speech and their Perceptual Importance, Proceedings of the 20th ACM International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents, IVA 2020, International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVA), 2020, 2020
Ylva Ferstl, Michael Neff, Rachel McDonnell, Adversarial gesture generation with realistic gesture phasing, Computers and Graphics, 89, 2020, p117 - 130
Emma Carrigan, Katja Zibrek, Rozenn Dahyot, Rachel McDonnell, Investigating perceptually based models to predict importance of facial blendshapes, Proceedings - MIG 2020: 13th ACM SIGGRAPH Conference on Motion, Interaction, and Games, ACM SIGGRAPH Conference on Motion, Interaction and Games , 2020, 2020
Katja Zibrek, Benjamin Niay, Anne-Helene Olivier, Ludovic Hoyet, Julien Pettre and Rachel McDonnell, The effect of gender and attractiveness of motion on proximity in virtual reality, ACM Transactions on Applied Perception, 17, (4), 2020
Katja Zibrek, Benjamin Niay, Anne-Helene Olivier, Ludovic Hoyet, Julien Pettre and Rachel McDonnell, Walk this way: Evaluating the effect of perceived gender and attractiveness of motion on proximity in virtual reality, Proceedings - 2020 IEEE Conference on Virtual Reality and 3D User Interfaces, VRW 2020, IEEE Conference on Virtual Reality and 3D User Interfaces Abstracts and Workshops , 2020, 2020, pp169 - 170
Shubhajit Basak, Hossein Javidnia, Faisal Khan, Rachel McDonnell, Michael Schukat, Methodology for Building Synthetic Datasets with Virtual Humans, 31st Irish Signals and Systems Conference, ISSC 2020, 2020, 2020
Wisessing P, McDonnell R, Evalu-light: A practical approach for evaluating character lighting in real-time, Proceedings - SAP 2020: ACM Symposium on Applied Perception, 2020, 2020
Emma Carrigan, Eduard Zell, Cedric Guiard, Rachel McDonnell, Expression Packing: As-Few-As-Possible Training Expressions for Blendshape Transfer, Computer Graphics Forum (Eurographics), 39, (2), 2020, p219 - 233
Katja Zibrek, Rachel McDonnell, Social presence and place illusion are affected by photorealism in embodied VR, Proceedings - MIG 2019: ACM Conference on Motion, Interaction, and Games, ACM SIGGRAPH Conference on Motion, Interaction and Games, 2019, 2019
Katja Zibrek, Sean Martin, Rachel McDonnell, Is photorealism important for perception of expressive virtual humans in virtual reality?, ACM Transactions on Applied Perception, 16, (3), 2019
Eduard Zell, Katja Zibrek, Rachel McDonnell, Perception of Virtual Characters, SIGGRAPH Courses, Los Angeles, ACM, 2019, pp21.1 - 21.17
Pisut Wisessing, Katja Zibrek, Douglas Cunningham, Rachel McDonnell, A psychophysical model to control the brightness and key-to-fill ratio in CG cartoon character lighting, Proceedings - SAP 2019: ACM Conference on Applied Perception, ACM Symposium on Applied Perception, 2019, 2019
Ylva Ferstl, Michael Neff, Rachel McDonnell, Multi-objective adversarial gesture generation, ACM SIGGRAPH Conference on Motion, Interaction and Games, 2019, 2019
Ilaria Torre, Emma Carrigan, Rachel McDonnell, Katarina Domijan, Killian McCabe, Naomi Harte, The effect of multimodal emotional expression and agent appearance on trust in human-agent interaction, Proceedings - MIG 2019: ACM Conference on Motion, Interaction, and Games, ACM Conference on Motion, Interaction, and Games, 2019, 2019
Katja Zibrek, Elena Kokkinara, Rachel McDonnell, The Effect of Realistic Appearance of Virtual Characters in Immersive Environments - Does the Character's Personality Play a Role?, IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, 224, (4), 2018, p1681-1690
Zibrek, K. and Kokkinara, E. and McDonnell, R., The effect of realistic appearance of virtual characters in immersive environments - Does the character's personality play a role?, IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, 24, (4), 2018, p1681-1690
Ilaria Torre, Emma Carrigan, Killian McCabe, Rachel McDonnell, Naomi Harte, Survival at the museum: A cooperation experiment with emotionally expressive virtual characters, ICMI '18 Proceedings of the 20th ACM International Conference on Multimodal Interaction , 2018, pp423-427
Carrigan E, Hoyet L, McDonnell R, Avril Q, A preliminary investigation into the impact of training for example-based facial blendshape creation, European Association for Computer Graphics - 39th Annual Conference, EUROGRAPHICS 2018 - Short Papers, 2018, 2018, pp49 - 52
Ylva Ferstl, Rachel McDonnell, Investigating the use of recurrent motion modelling for speech gesture generation, 18th International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents, Sydney, NSW, Australia , November 05 - 08, 20, 2018, pp93-98
Ylva Ferstl, Rachel McDonnell, A perceptual study on the manipulation of facial features for trait portrayal in virtual agents, 18th International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents, Sydney, Australia, 2018, pp281 - 288
Emma Carrigan, Ludovic Hoyet, Rachel McDonnell, Quentin Avril, A Preliminary Investigation into the Impact of Training for Example-Based Facial Blendshape Creation, Eurographics 2018 - Short Papers, The Eurographics Association, 2018
Joao Paulo Cabral, Benjamin R Cowan, Katja Zibrek, Rachel McDonnell, The influence of synthetic voice on the evaluation of a virtual character, Interspeech , 2017-August, 2017, pp229 - 233
Ylva Ferstl, Elena Kokkinara, Rachel McDonnell, Facial features of non-player creatures can influence moral decisions in video games, ACM Transactions on Applied Perception, 15, (1), 2017, p4-
Katja Zibrek, Elena Kokkinara, Rachel McDonnell, Don't stand so close to me: Investigating the effect of control on the appeal of virtual humans using immersion and a proximity-based behavioral task, SAP '17 Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on Applied Perception , 2017, pp3-
Kerstin Ruhland, Mukta Prasad, Rachel McDonnell, Data-driven approach to synthesizing facial animation using motion capture, IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, 37, (4), 2017, p30-41
Costigan T, Gerdelan A, Carrigan E, McDonnell R, Improving blendshape performance for crowds with GPU and GPGPU Techniques, Proceedings - Motion in Games 2016: 9th International Conference on Motion in Games, MIG 2016, 2016, 2016, pp73 - 78
Pisut Wisessing and John Dingliana and Rachel McDonnell, Perception of Lighting and Shading for Animated Virtual Characters , SAP '16 Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on Applied Perception , Anaheim, CA, USA, 22-23 July, 2016, 2016, pp1-5
Ylva Ferstl, Elena Kokkinara, Rachel McDonnell, Do I trust you, abstract creature?: A study on personality perception of abstract virtual faces, SAP '16 Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on Applied Perception , 2016, pp39-43
Carrigan E, Kokkinara E, Gheorghe F, Houlier M, Donikian S, McDonnell R, Crowd appearance affects player performance in game combat scenarios, Proceedings - Motion in Games 2016: 9th International Conference on Motion in Games, MIG 2016, 2016, 2016, pp187 - 192
Ruhland K, Zibrek K, McDonnell R, Perception of personality through eye gaze of realistic and cartoon models, Proceedings - SAP 2015: ACM SIGGRAPH Symposium on Applied Perception, 2015, 2015, pp19 - 23
Elena Kokkinara, Rachel McDonnell, The effect of animation realism on face ownership and engagement, ACM International Conference Proceeding Series, FAA '15: Proceedings of Facial Analysis, and Animation, 2015, 11-September-2015, 2015
Katja Zibrek, Ludovic Hoyet, Kerstin Ruhland, Rachel McDonnell, Exploring the Effect of Motion Type and Emotions on the Perception of Gender in Virtual Humans, ACM Transactions on Applied Perception, 12, (3), 2015, p11
Elena Kokkinara, Rachel McDonnell, Animation realism affects perceived character appeal of a self-virtual face, Proceedings of the 8th ACM SIGGRAPH Conference on Motion in Games, MIG 2015, 2015, 2015, pp221 - 226
Costigan T, McDonnell R, Speech independent emotion transfer for virtual faces, ACM International Conference Proceeding Series, FAA '15: Proceedings of Facial Analysis, and Animation, 2015, 11-September-2015, 2015
Zibrek K, McDonnell R, Evaluating the uncanny valley with the implicit association test, Proceedings - SAP 2015: ACM SIGGRAPH Symposium on Applied Perception, 2015, 2015, pp135-
Kerstin Ruhland, Christopher E. Peters, Sean Andrist, Jeremy B. Badler, Norman I. Badler, Michael Gleicher, Bilge Mutlu, Rachel McDonnell, A Review of Eye Gaze in Virtual Agents, Social Robotics and HCI: Behaviour Generation, User Interaction and Perception, Computer Graphics Forum, 34, (6), 2015, p299 - 326
Eduard Zell, Carlos Aliaga, Adrian Jarabo, Katja Zibrek, Diego Gutierrez, Rachel McDonnell, Mario Botsch , To Stylize or not to Stylize? Effect of Shape and Material Stylization on the Perception of Computer Generated Faces, ACM Transactions on Graphics (SIGGRAPH Asia 2015), 34, (6), 2015, p184:1 - 184:12
Katja Zibrek, Rachel McDonnell, Does render style affect perception of personality in virtual humans?, SAP '14 Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on Applied Perception, Vancouver, BC; Canada, 8-9 AUg, 2014, pp111-115
Kerstin Ruhland, Sean Andrist, Jeremy B. Badler, Christopher E. Peters, Norman I. Badler, Michael Gleicher, Bilge Mutlu, Rachel McDonnell, Look me in the eyes: A survey of eye and gaze animation for virtual agents and artificial systems, Eurographics State-of-the-Art Reports (EG '14 STARs), 2014, pp69 - 91
Costigan, T., Prasad, M., McDonnell, R., Facial retargeting using neural networks, Proceedings - Motion in Games 2014, MIG 2014, Motion in Games 2014, MIG 2014, Los Angeles, 2014, 2014, pp31-38
Cathy Ennis, Ludovic Hoyet, Arjan Egges, Rachel McDonnell , Emotion Capture: Emotionally Expressive Characters for Games, ACM SIGGRAPH Conference on Motion in Games, November, 2013, 2013, pp53 - 60
Kajta Zibrek, Ludovic Hoyet, Kerstin Ruhland, Rachel McDonnell , Evaluating the Effect of Emotion on Gender Recognition in Virtual Humans, ACM Symposium on Applied Perception, Dublin, Ireland, 2013, pp45 - 49
Hoyet, L. , Ryall, K. , McDonnell, R. , O'Sullivan, C., Sleight of hand: Perception of finger motion from reduced marker sets, Proceedings - I3D 2012: ACM SIGGRAPH Symposium on Interactive 3D Graphics and Games, 16th ACM SIGGRAPH Symposium on Interactive 3D Graphics and Games, Costa Mesa, 2012, pp79 - 86
Rachel McDonnell, Martin Breidt, and Heinrich Bulthoff, Render me Real? Investigating the Effect of Render Style on the Perception of Animated Virtual Humans, ACM Transaction on Graphics (SIGGRAPH 2012), 31, (4), 2012, p99:1 - 99:11
ACM Transactions on Applied Perception, 9, 3, (2012)
Rachel McDonnell, Appealing Virtual Humans, Motion in Games, Rennes, France, November 15-17, 2012, 102 - 111pp
McDonnell R, Sundstedt V, Proceedings, SAP 2012 - ACM Symposium on Applied Perception: Preface, Proceedings, SAP 2012 - ACM Symposium on Applied Perception, 2012, p6-
Ludovic Hoyet, Kenneth Ryall, Rachel McDonnell and Carol O'Sullivan, Perception of finger motion from reduced marker sets, ACM SIGGRAPH Symposium on Interactive 3D Graphics and Games (I3D'12), Orange County, CA, March 2012, ACM, 2012, pp79 - 86
Ludovic Hoyet, Rachel McDonnell, Carol O'Sullivan, Push it Real: Perceiving Causality in Virtual Interactions, ACM Transaction on Graphics (SIGGRAPH 2012), 31, (4), 2012, p90:1 - 90:9
McHugh, JE, McDonnell, R, O'Sullivan, C & Newell, FN , Perceiving emotion in crowds: The role of dynamic body postures on the perception of emotion in crowded scenes, Experimental Brain Research, , 204, (3), 2010
McHugh, J.E., McDonnell, R., O'Sullivan, C. & Newell, F.N., Perceiving emotion in crowds: the role of dynamic body postures on the perception of emotion in crowded scenes, Experimental Brain Research., 204, (3), 2010, p361 - 372
Cathy Ennis, Rachel McDonnell, Carol O'Sullivan, Seeing is Believing: Body Motion Dominates in Multisensory Conversations, ACM Transactions on Graphics (SIGGRAPH 2010), 29, (3), 2010
Rachel McDonnell, Facial animation for real-time conversing groups, ACM/SSPNET Symposium on Facial Analysis and Animation, Edinburgh, 2010, 2010, pp13 - 13
McDonnell, R. and M. Breidt, Face Reality: Investigating the Uncanny Valley for virtual faces, Proceedings of the 3rd ACM SIGGRAPH Conference and Exhibition on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques in Asia , 3rd ACM SIGGRAPH Conference and Exhibition on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques in Asia (SIGGRAPH Asia 2010), Seoul, 16-18 December 2010, 2010
R. McDonnell, C. O'Sullivan, Movements and voices affect perceived sex of virtual conversers, ACM SIGGRAPH Symposium on Applied Perception in Graphics and Visualisation (APGV'10) , ACM, 2010, pp25-128
Martin Prazak, Rachel McDonnell, Carol O'Sullivan, Perceptual Evaluation of Human Animation Timewarping, SIGGRAPH Asia 2010 Conference on Sketches & Applications, South Korea, 2010
Martin Prazak, Rachel McDonnell, Ladislav Kavan, and Carol O'Sullivan, A perception based metric for comparing human motion, Eurographics Ireland Workshop, 2009, pp75 - 80
McDonnell, Rachel and Ennis, Cathy and Dobbyn, Simon and O'Sullivan, Carol, Talking bodies: Sensitivity to desynchronization of conversations, ACM Transactions on Applied Perception, 6, (4), 2009, p22-1 - 22-8
Rachel McDonnell, Sophie Joerg, Jessica K. Hodgins, Fiona Newell, and Carol O'Sullivan, Evaluating the effect of motion and body shape on the perceived sex of virtual characters, ACM Transactions on Applied Perception, 5, (4), 2009, p1 - 14
Rachel McDonnell, Sophie Joerg, Joanna McHugh, Fiona N. Newell, Carol O'Sullivan, Investigating the role of body shape on the perception of emotion, ACM Transactions on Applied Perception, 6, (3), 2009, p1 - 11
Rachel McDonnell, Micheal Larkin, Benjamin Hernandez, Isaac Rudomin, Carol O'Sullivan, Eye-catching Crowds: Saliency based selective variation, ACM Transactions on Graphics (SIGGRAPH 2009), 28, (3), 2009
Christopher Peters, Cathy Ennis, Rachel McDonnell, Carol O' Sullivan, Crowds in Context: Evaluating the Perceptual Plausibility of Pedestrian Orientations , Eurographics 2008 Short Papers Proceedings, Crete, 2008, pp33 - 36
Rachel McDonnell, Sophie Jörg, Joanna McHugh, Fiona Newell and Carol O'Sullivan, Evaluating the emotional content of human motions on real and virtual characters, ACM SIGGRAPH Symposium on Applied Perception in Graphics and Visualization (APGV'08), Los Angeles, August, edited by S. Creem-Regehr and K. Myszkowski , ACM Press, 2008, pp67-74
Rachel McDonnell, Micheal Larkin, Simon Dobbyn, Steven Collins and Carol O'Sullivan, Clone Attack! Perception of Crowd Variety, ACM Transactions on Graphics (SIGGRAPH 2008), 27, (3), 2008, p1 - 8
Kavan, L., McDonnell, R., Dobbyn, S., Zara, J., O'Sullivan, C., Skinning Arbitrary Deformations, I3D'07: ACM SIGGRAPH Symposium on Interactive 3D Graphics and Games, Seattle WA, April 30 - May 2, ACM Press, 2007, pp53 - 60
Rachel McDonnell, Sophie Joerg, Jessica Hodgins, Fiona Newell, Carol O'Sullivan, Virtual Shapers & Movers: Form and Motion affect Sex Perception, ACM International Conference Proceeding Series, APGV'07: ACM SIGGRAPH Symposium on Applied Perception in Graphics and Visualization, Tuebingen, Germany, 25-27 May, 253, 2007, pp7 - 10
Rachel McDonnell, Fiona Newell, Carol O'Sullivan, Smooth Movers: Perceptually Guided Human Motion Simulation, Eurographics/ ACM SIGGRAPH Symposium on Computer Animation, San Diego, U.S., August, 2007, edited by D. Metaxas and J. Popovic , ACM Press, 2007, pp259 - 269
Rachel McDonnell, Simon Dobbyn, Carol O'Sullivan, Pipeline for Populating Games with Realistic Crowds, International Journal of Intelligent Games and Simulation, 4, (2), 2007, p1 - 15
Rachel McDonnell, Simon Dobbyn and Carol O'Sullivan., Crowd Creation Pipeline for Games, the 9th International Conference on Computer Games, CGames 2006, Dublin, November 2006, 2006, pp183 - 190
Simon Dobbyn, Rachel McDonnell, Ladislav Kavan, Steven Collins and Carol O'Sullivan , Clothing the Masses: Real-Time Clothed Crowds With Variation. , Eurographics Short Papers proceedings , Vienna, Austria, September 2006, 2006, pp103 - 106
Rachel McDonnell, Simon Dobbyn, Steven Collins and Carol Ann O'Sullivan, Perceptual evaluation of level of detail clothing for virtual humans, Proceedings of the 2006 ACM SIGGRAPH/Eurographics symposium on Computer animation, Vienna, Austria, September 2006, edited by M.P.Cani and J.O'Brien , 2006, pp117 - 126
Ljiljana Skrba, Simon Dobbyn, Rachel McDonnell and Carol O'Sullivan , Animating Dolly: Real-time Herding and Rendering of Sheep, Eurographics Ireland Workshop, Dublin, October 2006, edited by C. Noonan , 2006, pp7 - 12
Rachel McDonnell, Simon Dobbyn, Carol O'Sullivan, LOD Human Representations: A Comparative Study, Proceedings of the First International Workshop on Crowd Simulation (V-CROWDS '05), Lausanne, Switzerland, November, 2005, edited by Thalmann, D. , 2005, pp101 - 115
John Hamill, Rachel McDonnell, Simon Dobbyn and Carol O'Sullivan, Perceptual evaluation of impostor representations for virtual humans and buildings , Computer Graphics Forum, 24, (3), 2005, p623 - 633
Carol O'Sullivan, Sarah Howlett, Yann Morvan, Rachel McDonnell and Keith O'Conor, Perceptually adaptive graphics, EUROGRAPHICS 2004, State of the Art Reports, Grenoble, France, 2004, pp141 - 164
Non-Peer-Reviewed Publications
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]
Eduard Zell, Katja Zibrek, Xueni Pan, Marco Gillies, Rachel McDonnell, From Perception to Interaction with Virtual Characters, Eurographics 2020 - Tutorials, 2020
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
Daniel Thalmann, Carol O'Sullivan, Barbara Yersin, Jonathan Maim, Rachel McDonnell, Populating Virtual Environments with Crowds, Eurographics Tutorials, 2007
Research Expertise
Description
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.Projects
- Title
- RADICal: on-set virtual Reality for Actors portraying DIgital Characters
- 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
- Date From
- September 2021
- Date To
- September 2025
- Title
- Game Face: Perceptually Optimised Real-Time Facial Animation
- 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
- Date From
- 2014
- Date To
- 2019
- Title
- Cartoon Motion: Stylised facial animation from motion capture
- 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
- Date From
- 2013
- Date To
- 2017
Recognition
Representations
Advisory board for Eurographics
Associate Editor for ACM Transactions on Applied Perception
Associate Editor for the Journal of Eurographics, the European Association for Computer Graphics (Computer Graphics Forum)
Editorial board for Frontiers in Virtual Reality Journal.
Eurographics Program Committee Member
External Examiner for PhD defence at INRIA, Rennes, France.
Program Chair for Symposium on Applied Perception in Graphics and Visualization, Los Angeles, U.S.A.
ACM SIGGRAPH Program Committee Member
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.
External Examiner for PhD defence at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm.
Program Committee Member for ACM SIGGRAPH Symposium on Applied Perception
ACM SIGGRAPH Asia Program Committee Member
Program Committee Member for CASA: Computer Animation and Social Agents conference
Program Committee Member for ACM SIGGRAPH Conference on Motion in Games
Program Committee Member for ACM SIGGRAPH/Eurographics Symposium on Computer Animation
External Examiner for PhD defence at Brandenburg University of Technology Cottbus - Senftenberg
Program Committee Member for IEEE VR
Program Committee Member for ACM SIGGRAPH Interactive 3D Graphics and Games (I3D)
ACM SIGGRAPH Asia Sketches and Posters Program Committee Member
Awards and Honours
Best Conference Paper at IEEE VR
Graphics Replicability Stamp Initiative (GRSI) best paper award
Best Paper Honorable Mention at ACM International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVA)
Selected as on of the top 5 papers at ACM Symposium on Applied Perception
Fellowship, Trinity College Dublin
Best Short Paper Award at ACM SIGGRAPH Conference on Motion, Interaction, and Games
Best Paper Honorable Mention at ACM Symposium on Applied Perception
Best Paper Award at ACM Symposium on Applied Perception
Best paper award (top 5) at ACM SIGGRAPH Conference on Motion in Games
Career Development Award (SFI)
Memberships
Association for Computing Machinery