Jose Luis Ponton and his advisor Nuria Pelechano after receiving the award. Photo: private
Jose Luis Ponton, Postdoctoral Researcher in the Visual Computing and Artificial Intelligence department, has received the 2026 Best PhD Thesis Award from the Spanish Chapter of Eurographics at the 35th Spanish Conference on Computer Graphics (CEIG 2026). The award recognizes outstanding doctoral research in the field of computer graphics in Spain and was granted for his PhD dissertation completed at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC). At MPI for Informatics he works on digital humans, character animation, and generative AI for virtual environments and robotics.
His dissertation, “Learning Data-driven Character Animation for Avatars in Virtual Reality”, addresses one of the central challenges in virtual reality: reconstructing realistic full-body human motion from sparse wearable sensors. The work enables high-quality avatar animation without the need for traditional motion-capture suits, making immersive technologies more accessible and practical.
The thesis developed novel machine learning and generative AI methods capable of recovering detailed human motion from limited tracking signals. His contributions include SparsePoser, a real-time system for reconstructing full-body motion from only six VR trackers; DragPoser, a generative framework that supports flexible sensor configurations and precise motion constraints; and Step2Motion, a diffusion-based approach that reconstructs full-body locomotion from pressure-sensing insoles and inertial sensors (developed during an internship at Max Planck Institute for Informatics).
The research combines computer graphics, virtual reality, machine learning, and generative models to bridge the gap between high-end motion capture systems and consumer-grade wearable devices. These technologies have potential applications in virtual and augmented reality, telepresence, gaming, digital humans, and human-computer interaction.
The results of this work have been published in leading international venues, including ACM Transactions on Graphics (SIGGRAPH and SIGGRAPH Asia), Computer Graphics Forum (Eurographics) and ACM CHI.
Jose Luis Ponton conducted his doctoral research at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya under the supervision of Carlos Andujar and Nuria Pelechano. During his PhD, he carried out research stays at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics in Saarbrücken and Meta Reality Labs in Zurich. He is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics, where he continues his work on digital humans, character animation, and generative AI for virtual environments and robotics.
More Information:
https://eurographics.es/CEIG26/#awards