REAL MOVES Your ‘NBA 2K’ avatar might be getting a serious upgrade, thanks to CMU research

IPittsburgh Post-Gazette t’s happened to the best of us: You’re dribbling the basketball down the court when all of a sudden you realize it appears to be stuck to your fingers.

Or you release the ball and watch it move in a pretty impossible trajectory from your hand to the surface of the court.

Well, that mostly only happens in the virtual world of “NBA 2K” video games.

Those games are state-of-theart. The avatars have pretty natural motion, sure, but they still contain some artifacts — essentially computer science lingo for glitches.

New Carnegie Mellon University research uses a form of deep learning to create physics-based character animations for video games. The aim is to create the most realistic movements possible.

“If we understand how people move, we can see if they’re moving in expected or unexpected ways,” said Jessica Hodgins, a co-author of the new study who also serves as a professor at CMU’s Robotics Institute and Computer Science Department.

That’s helpful in medicine or biomechanics, she said, because it helps in rehabilitation exercises. In the short term, though, Ms. Hodgins expects the research to be used commercially for video games.

The authors used deep reinforcement learning — a type of goal-oriented algorithm — to teach computers to dribble. Not unlike the 10,000-hour rule set forth by Malcolm Gladwell in his book “Outliers: The Story of Success,” it takes serious repetition to teach computers these moves. Mr. Gladwell’s 10,000hour rule states that it takes as many hours of intentional practice to master a skill.

Outside motion capture footage of real people dribbling basketballs was used to teach the system. Over millions of trials, animated players learned to dribble between their legs, dribble behind their backs and do crossover moves. They also discovered how to transition from one skill to another.