Is immersive animation the ultimate interface for content creators?
The challenge
Animating 3D characters still demands years of practice and professional-grade tools. While video capture has democratized content creation, 3D animation remains inaccessible—especially for beginners who want to bring humanoid characters to life with realistic, compelling motion.
The collaboration
Project Reframe is a proof-of-concept from Autodesk Research and Meta for recording and editing motion in virtual reality. Built on research published as TimeTunnel Live (CHI EA 2024), the system captures body motion, facial expressions, and hand gestures through simple VR recording—then offers an immersive editing interface that integrates spatial and temporal control. Keyposes appear along a timeline; joints connect through 3D trajectories so a creator can see and reshape a character’s movement in space and time. A “one-man band” demo shows how one person can perform multiple characters in a single session.
My contribution
While at Meta, I supported this R&D collaboration through user experience design and testing—facilitating the research process between Meta and Autodesk teams, and helping integrate frontier body-tracking capabilities from the Quest Movement SDK. The goal was to open a new creative surface for artists who don’t come from traditional animation pipelines: express intent with body, fingers, face, gaze, and speech; enhance presence and storytelling in real time; and author 3D animation through spatial understanding rather than timeline keyframing alone.
Autodesk University
I joined a panel of experts from Meta, Workshop XR, Entertainment and Media Solutions, and Autodesk Research for Is Immersive Animation the Ultimate Interface for Content Creators? at Autodesk University. The session explored what happens when the user isn’t a trained animator—when new input modalities let untrained creators record and edit 3D motion in minutes. Project Reframe was recognized with Best of AU in 2024.
Project Credits & Information
- Project type
- Research
- Partner
- Meta · Autodesk Research
- Agency
- —
- Role
- Strategy, Production, UX
- Credits
- Autodesk Research: Qian Zhou, David Ledo, Sebastian Herrera, Fraser Anderson, Hilmar Koch, et al. · Meta Platforms · Quest Movement SDK
- Website
- —
- Date
- 2023–2024
