Dynamic Artificial Potential Fields for Autonomous Camera Control

Camera control in real-time interactive 3D applications is a challenging problem. Developing a generalized system able to produce high quality visual results and smooth camera movements in dynamic environments remains an open problem in the research community. In this paper, we describe the implementation and evaluation of Artificial Potential Fields for automatic camera placement. We first describe the recasting of the frame composition problem as a solution to a two particles suspended in an Artificial Potential Field. We demonstrate the application of this technique to control both camera location and camera aim direction. We show that this technique can be successfully used to solve both camera animation and frame composition tasks in dynamic environments in real-time through an example implemented on an existing 3D game engine.