XSAMPL3D: An Action Description Language for the Animation of Virtual Characters

In this paper we present XSAMPL3D, a novel language for the high-level representation of actions performed on objects by (virtual) humans. XSAMPL3D was designed to serve as action representation language in an imitation-based approach to character animation: First, a human demonstrates a sequence of object manipulations in an immersive Virtual Reality (VR) environment. From this demonstration, an XSAMPL3D description is automatically derived that represents the actions in terms of high-level action types and involved objects. The XSAMPL3D action description can then be used for the synthesis of animations where virtual humans of different body sizes and proportions reproduce the demonstrated action. Actions are encoded in a compact and human-readable XML-format. Thus, XSAMPL3D describtions are also amenable to manual authoring, e.g. for rapid prototyping of animations when no immersive VR environment is at the animator's disposal. However, when XSAMPL3D descriptions are derived from VR interactions, they can accomodate many details of the demonstrated action, such as motion trajectiories,hand shapes and other hand-object relations during grasping. Such detail would be hard to specify with manual motion authoring techniques only. Through the inclusion of language features that allow the representation of all relevant aspects of demonstrated object manipulations, XSAMPL3D is a suitable action representation language for the imitation-based approach to character animation.

‘Abuse of Rights’ in Belgian and French Patent Law – A Case Law Analysis

This paper examines what types of actions undertaken by patent holders have been considered as abusive in the framework of French and Belgian patent litigation. Particular attention is given to the principle of the prohibition of “abuse of rights” (AoR). In the jurisdictions under scrutiny, the principle of AoR is essentially a jurisprudential construction in cases where judges faced a particular set of circumstances for which no codified rules were available. To investigate how judges deal with the prohibition of AoR in patent litigation and taking into account the jurisprudential nature of the principle, an in-depth and comparative case law analysis has been conducted. Although the number of cases in which patent holders have been sanctioned for such abuses is not overabundant, they do provide sufficient leads on what is understood by Belgian and French courts to constitute an abuse of patent rights. From this comparative analysis, useful lessons can be learned for the interpretation of the ambiguous notion of ‘abuse’ from a broader perspective.