Marc Habermann receives the EUROGRAPHICS Young Researcher Award 2026. Marc obtained his PhD from the Max Planck Institute for Informatics. He is currently leading the Graphics and Vision for Digital Humans Group in the Visual Computing and Artificial Intelligence Department at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics.
Marc has made significant contributions to human performance capture, digital human reconstruction, and photorealistic human rendering by combining computer graphics, computer vision, and machine learning in innovative new ways. His research bridges classical model-based approaches with modern neural representations to enable realistic, controllable, and efficient digital humans.
The following are exemplary achievements. During his doctoral research, Marc introduced LiveCap the first real-time monocular method for reconstructing detailed, non-rigid human surface motion from video. He subsequently developed DeepCap, the first learning-based framework for high-fidelity human performance capture from weakly supervised RGB data, which received a CVPR Best Paper Award Honorable Mention. Building on these foundations, his work on Real-time Deep Dynamic Characters unified explicit geometric modeling and neural rendering to achieve real-time, high-quality human reconstruction and synthesis. More recently, his research has advanced hybrid neuro-explicit representations and efficient rendering techniques for animatable, photorealistic human avatars, significantly improving realism, scalability, and practical applicability in immersive environments.
The work of Marc Habermann has been published at the top-tier venues of computer graphics and computer vision, including SIGGRAPH, ACM Transactions on Graphics, CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, EUROGRAPHICS, and NeurIPS. His research has received multiple distinctions, including the EUROGRAPHICS PhD Award, the DAGM MVTec Dissertation Award, and the Otto Hahn Medal of the Max Planck Society.
Marc’s contributions have significantly shaped the future of digital human modeling and rendering, bringing realistic and interactive virtual humans closer to widespread real-world use.
EUROGRAPHICS is extremely pleased to recognize Marc Habermann with the 2026 Young Researcher Award in recognition of his outstanding contributions to Computer Graphics in the area of digital humans, performance capture, and neural rendering.