IVA09 - 9th International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents
Gathering of Animated Lifelike Agents

Gathering of Animated Lifelike Agents

GALA 09

Video Deadline extension: 15th June - final video 12 August
PAPER DEADLINE PASSED - Note: Paper is optional, you can still submit a video for the event

GALA, Gathering of Animated Lifelike Agents, is an annual festival to showcase the latest Animated Lifelike Agents created by university students, academic or industrial research groups. The goals of GALA are manifold: An international jury will select entries for the GALA Gallery and award prizes to student submissions according to certain aspects. The presentation of the best entries and announcement of the awards will take place at the GALA Final, which is coupled with a prestigious conference each year. This year the GALA Final will take place at the 9th International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents - IVA 2009, 14-16 September, in Amsterdam, Holland.

There are three submissions categories: Tennis Spectator, Animated Agent Application and Animated Agent Creation.
The quality and capacity of the animated agent or the tool is to be presented in a short movie (see Submission details). At the GALA Final, there will be on-line demonstrations. In this respect GALA is complementary to scientific conferences where demonstrations are at most illustrations of talks, usually not included in proceedings and thus hard to reproduce. Another difference is that GALA intends to attract students, with submissions prepared in a shorter time, preferably as a project related to some university curriculum. This is unlike the output of larger-scale research presented at conferences.

Call for Participation

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. Tennis Spectator - The Tennis Spectator is an animated character watching a tennis match. The challenge is to produce a believable and engaging spectator, that reacts realistically to the events in a tennis match, conveying a sense of what is happening in the match and the increase of tension. The Tennis Spectator should be able to react in real time to any annotation of a tennis match supplied. The annotation format is available from the Materials section of the gala website. Candidates should consider the following:
    • The spectator can be a full body or talking head character.
    • The camera should focus on the character, the "live" tennis match may be shown seperately at the event, but should not be represented in the submission.
    • The spectator should react in synchronisation with the events shown in the annotation (ANVIL) file, using (where applicable) voice, facial expressions, gesture and posture (if the Virtual Human is full body)
    • The spectator should be as expressive as possible, whilst still being a believable virtual human
  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, as well as a high quality version of the video for the GALA presentation.

Submission

For details of the submission categories, please look at the Call For Participation section.

General Procedure

Candidates will need to submit a two page paper by the 1st May, followed by an initial video in .flv format by the 1st June. These elements will then be judged by the panel, and sucessful applicants will be invided to provide a high quality version of their video and a camera ready version of their paper.

What to Submit

Paper

Candidates must also submit a two page paper, outlining the work. It must use the IVA templates and be supplied in pdf format. New Extended Deadline: 15th May 2009 - GALA paper deadline

Video

Initial submissions must take the form of a .flv video (flash video), between 2 and 4 minutes, in 400 x 300 ratio. The video must contain Author and Institution details.
1st June 2009 - GALA flash video submission deadline Finalists will be invited to submit a high quality version of their video, also between 2 and 4 minutes, in 800 x 600 ratio, in the AVI format. This will be shown during the presentation, and must also contain Author and Institution details. 12th August - GALA final (presentation ready) video submission deadline

How to Submit

Email Submission

The submission email address is gala09 at ncl.ac.uk. Submissions should consist of:

Important Dates

  1. 17th April 2009 - IVA full paper submission deadline.
  2. 1st May 2009 NEW deadline 15th May - GALA short paper deadline
  3. 22nd May 2009 - IVA full paper notification
  4. 1st June 2009 - GALA flash video submission deadline - NEW DEADLINE 15th June
  5. 12th June 2009 - IVA paper - camera ready
  6. 12th June 2009 - GALA short paper - camera ready
  7. 26th June 2009GALA final (presentation ready) video submission deadline - NEW DEADLINE 12th August
  8. 14th - 16th September 2009 - IVA 2009 event

Programme

To Be Confirmed.

Technology Links

Some useful starting points for creating a character:

3d Engines

3d Character Animation Programming

3d Character Creation

3d Modelling

Video Editing

Video Transcoding

Materials

Tennis Spectator


ANVIL video annotation tool

Call for Participation

.pdf file

Contacts

Philip Heslop

Postal Address:

Space 2,
Culture Lab,
Kings Walk,
Newcastle University,
UK
NE1 7RU.
Telephone:

+44 (0)191 246 4629

Sponsors

Awards & Evaluation

Awards

At the GALA Final, the Jury Award(s), each of 350 euros, will be announced. The Public Awards will be given according to the votes of the audience present. In the case of the student track, a GALA award will be given. Besides, a public award may be considered.

Evaluation process

The movie submissions, together with the documentation provided, will be judged by an international and multi-disciplinary jury of 6 to 10 people, not including supervisors of any students who submitted. The evaluation of entries will be a two-pass process: first a short list will be compiled by the jury, with entries to be shown at the GALA Final and to be included to the on-line GALA Gallery. Representatives of each entry will be invited to the GALA Final, to present their system. Details on the GALA Final, preferably with live demos, will be announced on time.

The jury

To be announced.