Avatars might ‘learn’ more realistic moves

— such as the pose and the velocity at which you’re traveling — as well as the current state of the rest of the court before computing the way the basketball will roll from your character’s fingertips.

That ensures that, given the avatar’s motion, the ball moves in a physically plausible way. Rather than the ball appearing to stick to the player’s fingers, it might spin on the avatar’s fingertips. Those minute details are usually very difficult to capture.

Ms. Hodgins said she and co-author Libin Liu, chief scientist for DeepMotion, a Redwood City, Calif-based animation company, focused on basketball because the speed and agility required to play the game is significant.

“It’s challenging. ... The character is able to do some pretty complicated manipulations as far as the tricks and dribbling,” she said. “And you have to remain balanced while doing these tricks with the ball.”

In the future, Ms. Hodgins said, a similar method may be used to train robots.

While there’s an added layer of complexity in robots — you must actually build the mechanism — they’re still subject to the real-world rules of physics that a video game avatar may override.

“Because we’re doing simulations, we don’t have torque limits that humans have that limit us,” Ms. Hodgins explained. “Even [with] an athlete, there’s a limit to the power source and how strong they may be.”

As for the next challenge? Ms. Hodgins says it’ll likely be soccer.