Whoah, that's so awesome. The M&M Man manipulation is nuts.

Jeff Han demos something really similar -- almost to the T -- in his TED presentation of the Microsoft Surface technology. He even mentions "the mesh," which leads me to wonder if it's the same rigid-as-possible approach. See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QKh1Rv0PlOQ at around 7:30.

Nitpick #2, Jeff Han references that he's implementing this rigid as possible paper at about 8:20. Jeff is a big fan of research and implements a lot of existing techniques invented by others in his demos.

I work in the same lab as Tomer who did this paper, Big Ups Tomer!

Nitpick: Jeff Han is affiliated with NYU and his own company, Perceptive Pixel, not Microsoft.

Yep, you're right.

Adobe After Effects CS3 uses the algorithm or something very very similar in it's Puppet tool. I used it quite extensively last summer doing this animation for the Heinz "Top This" commercial competition.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2DJQ9PuT4I8

We didn't win, but my wife (the director) did get a personalized bottle of ketchup out of the deal.

If you want to see more of the Puppet tool, there's a tutorial here: http://www.metacafe.com/watch/885847/puppet_tool_in_adobe_af...

Video of puppet tool in use start around minute 2:45

This is mindblowingly great. I guess it goes to show how intuitive [physical] models can be if you choose the right thing [energy function] to do [to minimize], and design an algorithm to successfully do so.

It's beautiful that they chose rigidity too -- it is an extremely natural behavior that most biological things would default to. And it's great fun to play with!

That's a neat little tech and it reminded me of something I saw on Gizmodo a while back called "smart scene resizing."

http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/innovation/smart-scene-carving-re...

I just got done wishing that this would happen:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=197781

And here it is. Nice.

The video is quite cool, but I'd be much more impressed by a link to a paper describing the algorithm in detail. Does anyone know if/where this work has been published?

Takeo Igarashi, Tomer Moscovich, John F. Hughes, "As-Rigid-As-Possible Shape Manipulation", ACM Transactions on Computer Graphics, Vol.24, No.3, ACM SIGGRAPH 2005, Los Angels, USA, 2005.

[The PDF is here.](http://www-ui.is.s.u-tokyo.ac.jp/~takeo/papers/rigid.pdf)

Amazing. I bet kids would love to play with this!

Heck, I would love to play with this!

I was fortunate enough to get a demo of this by the people working on it at the university of Tokyo in April. Our CS class was on a study tour in Japan. The technology is really amazing, especially when used to record animations. They also had other cool stuff, like a 3D leaves/flowers/trees design tool.