Motion planning for camera movements

Moving a camera through a (virtual or real) environment is a complicated task. Often a user is given direct control of the camera. Such direct control is difficult for inexperienced users and results in rather ugly camera motions that easily lead to motion sickness. In this paper we describe a new technique for automatic generation of camera motion using motion planning techniques from robotics. We focus here on motion in virtual environments. In our approach the user simply specifies a required goal position (and orientation) using e.g. a map, and the system automatically computes a smooth, collision free motion from the current position and orientation to the required position (and orientation) that can be used by the camera. As preprocessing, the approach uses the probabilistic roadmap method to compute a roadmap through the environment. When a motion is required, a path is obtained from the roadmap which is then improved by various smoothing techniques to satisfy constraints from cinematography.