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GALA (Gathering of Animated Lifelike Agents)
at IVA 2008, 1-3 September, Tokyo
http://hmi.ewi.utwente.nl/gala/.
Call for Participation
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GALA IN A NUTSHELL GALA is an annual festival to showcase the latest
Animated Lifelike
Agents created by university students and academic or industrial research
groups. GALA was launched in 2005. GALA provides:
- the GALA Final event, to demonstrate the state-of-the-art in the technology
of virtual humans;
- the GALA Jury Award for student projects and the GALA Public Award for any
entry;
- the permanent GALA Gallery on the web with the best entries exhibited for
further study.
An international jury will select entries for the GALA Gallery, to be
presented live at the GALA Final.
GALA is the major event for demonstrating your interactive virtual humans,
exploiting techniques in real-time graphics, animation, multimodal
interaction, agents, emotion modeling, dialog management and related areas.
The quality and interactive capabilities of the animated lifelike agent are
to be presented in a short movie (see Submission details). GALA is different
from and complementary to scientific conferences where demonstrations are at
most illustrations of talks, often not included in proceedings and thus hard
to reproduce. GALA specifically encourages university students at all levels
to submit their work prepared in a shorter time, preferably as a project
related to their university curriculum, unlike the output of larger-scale
research presented at conferences.
PARTICIPANTS TRACKS 1. Student Students from any university,
individually or as a group, may submit
in this track. For each student submission a supervisor should be named, who
can be contacted should the jury want to clarify some issues concerning
originality of the work or status of the authors. The works submitted in this
track must be prepared within a year prior to submission, preferably as a
student project related to a university curriculum. However, animated
lifelike agents created in the context of a larger research project or
industrial application are welcome too, as well as ones made on their
developer's own initiative, i.e. without any background context. In the first
case, the contribution of the student to the project as well as the earlier
results built upon should be specifically emphasized.
2. Other In this track work from academic institutions and industry, as
well as
from multi-party national or international projects, is welcome.
All submissions are candidates for the short list of entries, to be presented
at the final show and to be included in the repository. Submission categories
and formal requirements (see below) are identical for both tracks.
SUBMISSION CATEGORIES
1. Race Reporter
The Race Reporter is a talking head, reporting live on an ongoing horse race.
The challenge is to produce a believable and engaging reporter, both with
respect to the content and the presentation style, conveying the increase of
tension during the race. The Race Reporter should be able to report in real
time on any race generated by the Race Simulator, software provided via the
GALA web page.
2. Animated Lifelike Agent Application
The animated lifelike agent is developed for an application. The movie shows
the animated lifelike agent in the application context. The points of
interest are novelty of application, smoothness of interaction, appeal,
general design, consistency, etc.
3. Animated Lifelike Agent Creation
In this category, a special feature (e.g. lip-sync, body design, facial
animation, hand gesturing) of the animated lifelike agent is to be presented.
The points of interest are modules or tools used to create certain aspects of
animated lifelike agents, in an easy way and convincing quality.
In the last two categories, the embodiment (head/full body,
realistic/cartoon-like), the cast of role (e.g. information provider for the
user, actor in interactive drama, educator, chatbot) and the media (e.g.
Virtual reality, PC, palmtop, mobile phone) are open. Novel application
domains, designs and media are encouraged. The only restriction is that the
animated lifelike agent must have reactive and/or interactive capabilities,
as opposed to virtual characters animated for a single purpose (e.g. CG
animation for a film, direct usage of Motion Capture). Physical robots are
not eligible for GALA.
SUBMISSION FORMAT
The animated lifelike agent is to be documented and shown in a movie of 2-4
minutes, in the first round. The international jury will invite the entries
for the second round, to be demonstrated at the GALA Final in public.
The submission deadline is *1 June 2008*.
For further details, and submissions of previous years, see
http://hmi.ewi.utwente.nl/gala/.
ORGANIZERS
Chairs
Zsofia Ruttkay (University of Twente, The Netherlands)
Yukiko Nakano (Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology, Japan)
Steering committee
Elisabeth Andre (University of Augsburg, Germany)
Michael Kipp (DFKI, Germany)
Tsai-Yen Li (National Chengchi University, Taiwan)
Jean-Claude Martin (LIMSI-CNRS, France)
Stacy Marsella, (USC Information Science Institute, USA)
Anton Nijholt (University of Twente, The Netherlands)
Igor Pandzic (University of Zagreb, Croatia)
Helmut Prendinger (National Institute of Informatics, Japan)
Technical assistant
Hendri Hondorp (University of Twente, The Netherlands)
Contact
Zsofia Ruttkay by mail: zsofiATcs.utwente.nl
--
*Zsófia Ruttkay*
*Associate
Professor *
* Human Media Interaction
E-mail: [log in to unmask]*
*Department of Computer Science Phone:
+31 53 489 4650*
*University of
Twente URL:
http://hmi.ewi.utwente.nl/~zsofi <http://hmi.ewi.utwente.nl/%7Ezsofi>*
*The
Netherlands
S-mail: POBox 217, 7500 AE, Enschede*
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