Jose Luis Ponton

Jose Luis Ponton

Postdoctoral Researcher @ MPI

Generative AI 路 Character Animation 路 Robotics 路 Computer Graphics 路 XR/VR

Hello! I am an AI and Computer Graphics researcher specializing in Generative AI, Human Motion Models, and HCI, and I am now focused on applying my research to robotics. I am currently a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics. Recently, I earned my Ph.D. Cum Laude from UPC Barcelona, where my dissertation was recognized with the Best PhD Award by the Eurographics Spanish Section.

My background spans academia, Big Tech, and startups. As a Research Scientist Intern at Meta, I developed a scalable AI motion style transfer framework that progressed from prototype to production. Additionally, I built computer vision-based motion capture pipelines for Hyper Online, a Y Combinator startup.

My research is published in premier venues, including SIGGRAPH, SIGGRAPH Asia, Eurographics, IEEE VR, and CHI, and is widely adopted by the community. I actively maintain an open-source Motion Matching engine for Unity with over 500 GitHub stars, and I have grown a Spanish-language Game Dev YouTube channel to over 120,000 subscribers and 9 million views.

Selected Publications

STyMo: Fast and Controllable Few-Shot Motion Style Transfer

Jose Luis Ponton, Alexander Winkler, Ladislav Kavan, Yuting Ye, Petr Kadlecek

SIGGRAPH'26SIGGRAPHACM 路 Transactions on Graphics

Step2Motion: Locomotion Reconstruction from Pressure Sensing Insoles

Jose Luis Ponton, Eduardo Alvarado, Lin Geng Foo, Nuria Pelechano, Carlos Andujar, Marc Habermann

Eurographics'26EurographicsWiley 路 Computer Graphics Forum

Environment鈥慳ware Motion Matching

Jose Luis Ponton, Sheldon Andrews, Carlos Andujar, Nuria Pelechano

SIGGRAPH Asia'25SIGGRAPH AsiaACM 路 Transactions on Graphics

DragPoser: Motion Reconstruction from Variable Sparse Tracking Signals via Latent Space Optimization

Jose Luis Ponton, Eduard Pujol, Andreas Aristidou, Carlos Andujar, Nuria Pelechano

Eurographics'25EurographicsWiley 路 Computer Graphics Forum

Stretch your reach: Studying Self-Avatar and Controller Misalignment in Virtual Reality Interaction

Jose Luis Ponton, Reza Keshavarz, Alejandro Beacco, Nuria Pelechano

CHI'24CHI '24: Proceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

SparsePoser: Real鈥憈ime Full鈥慴ody Motion Reconstruction from Sparse Data

Jose Luis Ponton, Haoran Yun, Andreas Aristidou, Carlos Andujar, Nuria Pelechano

SIGGRAPH Asia'23SIGGRAPH AsiaACM 路 Transactions on Graphics

Fitted avatars: automatic skeleton adjustment for self鈥慳vatars in virtual reality

Jose Luis Ponton, V铆ctor Ceballos, Lesly Acosta, Alejandro R铆os, Eva Moncl煤s, Nuria Pelechano

2023Springer 路 Virtual Reality

Combining Motion Matching and Orientation Prediction to Animate Avatars for Consumer鈥慓rade VR

Jose Luis Ponton, Haoran Yun, Carlos Andujar, Nuria Pelechano

SCA'22ACM SIGGRAPH / Eurographics SYMPOSIUM ON COMPUTER ANIMATIONWiley 路 Computer Graphics Forum