By the time Omar Ahmad ’99, PhD ’11, came to the Whiting School to pursue his doctoral degree in 2006—a homecoming of sorts, since he’d also completed his undergraduate degree here —he’d been tinkering with physics-driven character animation for years. But to Ahmad, his and others’ animations never looked quite right. The characters’ actions seemed stilted and unnatural, keeping viewers from ever truly feeling like they could engender the illusion of life.
While working out at Johns Hopkins’ recreation center one day, Ahmad had an epiphany. Watching a bird alight on a branch outside, he realized that the approach used by the vast majority of scientists studying procedural animation—involving complex optimizations designed to cover millions of different outcomes of an animated character’s movement—wasn’t necessary to make visceral and lifelike animations.
“Making realistic movement was much more simple and elegant than people have thought,” Ahmad says.
Working with then undergraduate Promit Roy ’10 to try out this new approach, the two continued researching and testing for two years. Eventually, in a chance meeting with Johns Hopkins School of Medicine neurologist John Krakauer, Ahmad realized that his interest in physics animation could help in tackling a new movement challenge—
helping to heal stroke patients. Along with Krakauer, Roy, and artist Kat McNally, Ahmad co-founded the KATA project, an effort to create ultrarealistic animated creatures that users learn to control over time with flicks of their fingers, wrists, and arms.
They recently submitted the first product of the project, a video game called “I Am Dolphin,” to iTunes. They’ll also soon evaluate it as part of a comprehensive therapy plan for stroke patients. If it helps stroke patients relearn movements faster than traditional therapy, it could overturn conventional ideas on stroke rehab.