Igor Rodriguez

Eneko Atxa Landa, Elena Lazkano, Igor Rodriguez et al.

Animating realistic avatars requires using high quality animations for every possible state the avatar can be in. This includes actions like walking or running, but also subtle movements that convey emotions and personality. Idle animations, such as standing, breathing or looking around, are crucial for realism and believability. In games and virtual applications, these are often handcrafted or recorded with actors, but this is costly. Furthermore, recording realistic idle animations can be very complex, because the actor must not know they are being recorded in order to make genuine movements. For this reasons idle animation datasets are not widely available. Nevertheless, this paper concludes that both acted and genuine idle animations are perceived as real, and that users are not able to distinguish between them. It also states that handmade and recorded idle animations are perceived differently. These two conclusions mean that recording idle animations should be easier than it is thought to be, meaning that actors can be specifically told to act the movements, significantly simplifying the recording process. These conclusions should help future efforts to record idle animation datasets. Finally, we also publish ReActIdle, a 3 dimensional idle animation dataset containing both real and acted idle motions.

Eneko Atxa Landa, Igor Rodriguez, Elena Lazkano et al.

Idle animations are essential for virtual characters, as they convey realistic behaviour during inactive states. While automatic animation generation has been widely studied, limited attention has been given to idle motion due to the absence of dedicated training datasets. We introduce StayStill, a large-scale dataset of 3D idle animations comprising diverse motion types from 50 subjects, totalling approximately 6 hours of data. We also propose a standardised evaluation protocol for both numerical and user-based metrics as a first step towards a standardised evaluation process for future systems. To facilitate future research, we publicly release StayStill along with the evaluation code and a pre-trained baseline model that generates idle animations via transition concatenation. We believe that these contributions will enable future research on idle motion generation.

Miren Samaniego, Igor Rodriguez, Elena Lazkano

We introduce CapStARE, a capsule-based spatio-temporal architecture for gaze estimation that integrates a ConvNeXt backbone, capsule formation with attention routing, and dual GRU decoders specialized for slow and rapid gaze dynamics. This modular design enables efficient part-whole reasoning and disentangled temporal modeling, achieving state-of-the-art performance on ETH-XGaze (3.36) and MPIIFaceGaze (2.65) while maintaining real-time inference (< 10 ms). The model also generalizes well to unconstrained conditions in Gaze360 (9.06) and human-robot interaction scenarios in RT-GENE (4.76), outperforming or matching existing methods with fewer parameters and greater interpretability. These results demonstrate that CapStARE offers a practical and robust solution for real-time gaze estimation in interactive systems. The related code and results for this article can be found on: https://github.com/toukapy/capsStare

Unai Zabala, Igor Rodriguez, José María Martínez-Otzeta et al.

Social robot capabilities, such as talking gestures, are best produced using data driven approaches to avoid being repetitive and to show trustworthiness. However, there is a lack of robust quantitative methods that allow to compare such methods beyond visual evaluation. In this paper a quantitative analysis is performed that compares two Generative Adversarial Networks based gesture generation approaches. The aim is to measure characteristics such as fidelity to the original training data, but at the same time keep track of the degree of originality of the produced gestures. Principal Coordinate Analysis and procrustes statistics are performed and a new Fréchet Gesture Distance is proposed by adapting the Fréchet Inception Distance to gestures. These three techniques are taken together to asses the fidelity/originality of the generated gestures.

Unai Zabala, Igor Rodriguez, José María Martínez-Otzeta et al.

The goal of the system presented in this paper is to develop a natural talking gesture generation behavior for a humanoid robot, by feeding a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) with human talking gestures recorded by a Kinect. A direct kinematic approach is used to translate from human poses to robot joint positions. The provided videos show that the robot is able to use a wide variety of gestures, offering a non-dreary, natural expression level.