Automatic Shape and Pose Extraction

I was happy to see this that this blog is still getting updated, so I thought I'd share some cool and relevant research I learned about in my Computer Vision class. These researchers managed to construct a generic human model based on the common features of several meshes, and can use them to extract movement from a series of photos, and apply them to another model.

The results are really impressive. Their website is here, and there you can see some of the animations they created. If you're really interested, here's the paper I read:
http://www.cs.brown.edu/~ls/Publications/nips2007sigal.pdf