Virtual Humans3 Conference

[Elisabeth Roche]

 PR: CONFERENCE:  
 VIRTUAL HUMANS3 (VH3) Conference
 Universal City Hilton, Los Angeles, CA : June 16-17
 =============
 TITANIC, ADVENTURES OF SPIDERMAN, VERBOTS,
 V-HUMANS, METABORGS, CHATTERBOTS...
 =============
 **DON"T MISS**
 Richard Masur, President of the Screen Actors Guild
 
 DIGITAL KIDNAPPING: Moderator: Prof. Joseph J. Beard
 			       St John's University School of Law
 
 Engage with the most distinguished and diversely
 experienced panel ever convened to discuss
 Intellectual Property law and digital actors
 http://www.vrnews.com/eventsvh3program.html
 =============
 JOIN THE STANDARDS COMMITTEE:
 The Metaborg Consortium
 Moderator: Prof. Bowen Loftin, University of Houston
 
 Membership categories for academic and commercial groups.
 The Consortium will produce and demonstrate reference
 implementations of multiple-source virtual humans, define
 standard APIs, and guide the formal standards-making processes.
 
 =============
 TITANIC
 Andre Bustanoby, Digital Domain
 The huge success of the film 'Titanic' owed much to Digital
 Domain's highly sophisticated and realistic virtual humans
 special effects, possibly the most ambitious and challenging work
 of this type ever attempted. Andre Bustanoby will show some of
 these effects, and explain how they were achieved.
 
 =============
 REGISTER NOW! [Attendees wishing to be certain
 of securing a room at the hotel are strongly
 advised to register for the conference and make
 their reservation as soon as possible.]
 
 
 	By phone   Call: +1 619/467-9010

	Print and fill out this form,
 
 	Fax it to: +1 619/467-9310
 
 	By regular mail;
 	Print and fill out this form, and mail it to:
  	  	Meetings Unlimited, 4585 Mt. Bigelow Drive
         	San Diego, CA 92111, USA
 
 http://www.vrnews.com/eventsvh3registration.html
 
 ========
 **SPECIAL ROOM RATE THRU MAY 14**
 HOTEL BOOKING RESERVATIONS: 818-506-2500
 (Request the VR NEWS group rate.)
 
 ============
 VIRTUAL HUMANS3 (VH3) Conference
 Universal City Hilton, Los Angeles, CA : June 16-17
 
 Animators and movie makers alongside computer
 hardware and software companies, games developers
 alongside roboticists, military simulation
 experts alongside industrial ergonomists, avatar
 builders alongside academics.
 ============
 VIRTUAL HUMANS3 1998 CONFERENCE VH3 URLS:
 
 http://www.vrnews.com/eventsvh3dir.html
 http://www.vrnews.com/eventsvh3exhibits.html
 http://www.vrnews.com/eventsvh3registration.html
 http://www.vrnews.com/eventsvh3introduction.html
 http://www.vrnews.com/eventsvh3program.html
 http://www.vrnews.com/eventsvh3dir.html
 
 ============
 MEDIA INQUIRIES TO:
 
      KillerApp Communications
      5670 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles CA 90036
      Tel: +1 213/938-7600
      Fax: +1 213/939-7211
 ============
 EXHIBIT INQUIRIES TO:
 
      Meetings Unlimited
      4585 Mt Bigelow Drive
      San Diego, CA 92111
      Tel: +1 619/467-9010
      Fax: +1 619/467-9310
      Email: humans3 at ix.netcom.com
 ============
  WHERE and WHEN:
 
                       Universal City Hilton and Towers
                       At the entrance to 
                       Universal Studios, Hollywood
                       555 Universal Terrace Parkway
                       Universal City, CA 91608
                       +1-818-506-2500
                       FAX +1-818-509-2058
=============
DIRECTIONS From LAX:

405 freeway north to the 101 freeway southeast, to Los
Angeles. Stay on 101 all the way through the San
Fernando Valley. As the freeways divide, stay right onto
the 101 south. Take the Lankersham Blvd. exit. Turn right
at the signal, onto Cahuenga Blvd. Turn right again at the
next signal onto Lankershim Blvd. Go under the freeway
overpass and turn right at Universal Terrace Parkway, at
the Universal Studios sign. Go up the hill and take the
second right at the hotel driveway.

VIRTUAL HUMANS3  CONFERENCE 
June 16, 18, 1998, Universal City Hilton, Los Angeles, CA

PROGRAM
Tuesday 16th June 1998

8.00-9.00 am

Registration

9.00-9.05 am

Welcome & Opening Remarks
Dr Sandra K. Helsel, Conference Director

9.05-9.35 am

Keynote Address
Prof. Norm Badler, Director
Center for Human Modeling and Simulation
University of Pennsylvania

SESSION 1

Authoring Tools
Moderator: Bernie Roehl, University of Waterloo.

9.35-10.05am

Dr Stephen Lane, President, Katrix Inc.

Katrix has developed technology and authoring tools for the behavioral
animation of interactive characters. Current licensees and clients include
Microsoft, Intel and Disney.

10.05-10.35am

Prof. Nadia Magnenat-Thalmann, Director, MiraLab, University of Geneva.

Facial modeling is a major specialization at Miralab, where Dr Thalmann's
team has developed a generalised authoring system for real-time expression
and emotion sequences. This system has been used as a test-bed during the
development of the MPEG-4 SNHC virtual humans standard.

10.35-11.05am

Refreshment break

11.05-11.35am

Ben Verrall, Technical Director, Gibb Ltd

Gibb Ltd is a major civil engineering consultancy, and a world leader in
the design of airport terminals. They have interfaced their highly
sophisticated ARRIVE/DEPART people flow modeler to Superscape's VR
authoring software, to enable clients to 'visit' planned airport buildings
and see the traffic movement, queuing and congestion levels.

11.35-12.05pm

Dr Kurt D. Skifstad, VP/CTO, Transom Technologies Inc.

Transom will present and demonstrate their recently-announced 'TJ Toolkit',
for human body modeling, scaling, posing, animation and real-time
behavioral simulation. The toolkit is based around the Jack software
originally developed at the University of Pennsylvania.

12-05-12.20 pm

Exhibitor presentations

Each exhibiting company will spend a couple of minutes describing the
products and services they are displaying, to assist delegates in planning
their visits to the exhibit area.

12.20-2.00pm

Lunch, and view exhibits and demonstrations

2.00-2.30pm

Peter Plantec, Virtual Personalities Inc.

Virtual Personalities Inc. are developing programmable humanoid characters
called Verbots, capable of natural language responses. Verbots are
self-animated characters based on Julia, the well-known 'chatterbot'
developed by Peter's partner, Dr. Michael Mauldin. They combine natural
language with a little bit of Hollywood.

2.30-3.00pm

Chris Shaw, Haptek Inc.

Haptek have developed a toolkit for building realistic, real-time 3D heads
that speak, emote and morph under user control and autonomously.

3.00-3.30pm

Refreshment break

SESSION 2
3.30-4.45pm

The Metaborg Consortium
Moderator: Prof. Bowen Loftin, University of Houston

Speaker Panel:

Prof. Norm Badler
Prof. Nadia Thalmann
Prof. Daniel Thalmann
Bernie Roehl, and other members of the VRML H-anim group.

The Metaborg Consortium is an emerging international initiative which aims
to bring together the principal v-humans standards activities, so that
software subsystems from different developers can be integrated into
composite v-humans ('Metaborgs') and readily incorporated into
applications. The Consortium will produce and demonstrate reference
implementations of multiple-source virtual humans, define standard APIs,
and guide the formal standards-making processes.

Initial participants comprise the research labs and standards groups
represented by the speaker panel, together with Prof. Loftin's VETLab at
the University of Houston, which has agreed in principle to act as the
primary independent integration, administration and support center for the
Consortium. Other Executive Members of the Consortium are expected to
comprise major applications developers. There will additionally be
membership categories for academic and commercial groups interested in
participating or receiving information.

In this session the panelists will outline current standards activity,
discuss integration requirements, problems and opportunities, and seek the
views of the audience on plans for the Consortium.

4.45-5.00pm

Break

5.00-6.00pm

SESSION 3

Dialog Synthesis Master Class
Dr Scott Prevost, FX Palo Alto Laboratory

A fast-paced state-of-the-art review of the various layers and classes of
technology required for the simulation of intelligent dialog between
virtual humans and other virtual humans, and real humans .

6.00-7.00pm

Break

7.00pm

Dinner, sponsored by Silicon Graphics Inc.

The Dinner will take place in the main Conference Hall, and will continue
seamlessly into SESSION 4.

SESSION 4
Party Time
Moderator: Linda Jacobson, Virtual Reality Evangelist at Silicon Graphics


8.00-8.30pm

Greg Panos, Performance Animation Society

"A potpourri of human simulation examples from the entertainment community
in Los Angeles".

8.30-9.00pm

Jeff Kleiser, Kleiser Walczak Construction Co.

Jeff Kleiser is one of the world's leading digital special effects
designers. He originated and trademarked the term 'synthespian' in the late
1980s, and has a long list of well-known credits in the virtual actors
field. He will present some of the digital human animation work his company
is currently producing for a 70mm stereoscopic all CG theme park attraction
for Universal called The Adventures of Spiderman, and for a new opera
designed by Robert Wilson and composed by Philip Glass.

9.00-9.30pm

Break

9.30-10.00pm

Linda Jacobson, Silicon Graphics Inc.

Linda Jacobson will share some of her exploits as the human animator of
Rigby, a real-time
computer-generated character who provides an audience interaction
accompaniment to d'Cuckoo, the San Francisco techno band.

10.00-10.30pm

Prof Nadia Magnenat-Thalmann

Dr Thalmann's wide ranging research work in the virtual humans field
includes spectacular entertainments from time to time. She will present her
recent 'Cyberdance' project, and a current 'Virtual Fashion Show' development.

10.30-11.00pm

Andre Bustanoby, Digital Domain

The huge success of the film 'Titanic' owed much to Digital Domain's highly
sophisticated and realistic virtual humans special effects, possibly the
most ambitious and challenging work of this type ever attempted. Andre
Bustanoby will show some of these effects, and explain how they were achieved.

Wednesday 17th June 1998

SESSION 5

Autonomous Humanoids
Moderator: Prof. Daniel Thalmann, Director, Computer Graphics Laboratory,
École
Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne.

9.00-9.30am

Prof. Michael Zyda, Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, California

Computer-generated characters are part of every videogame and defense
simulation. We need such characters as intelligent opponents to live
players in videogames. We need such characters for fully automated
simulations. The Department of Defense and the Entertainment Industry share
common desires for computer-generated characters and can, perhaps, have a
common research agenda. In this presentation, we outline the desires of the
two communities for computer-generated characters and the scope of the
research agenda necessary to achieve those desires.

9.30-10.00am

Marty Stoneman, Anthrobotics Inc.

The presentation will discuss a new approach taken by the Anthrobotics
technology to decision making by virtual humans, in areas such as
recognition, planning, emotions, learning, and natural language interaction.

10.00-10.30am

Jeff Rickel, USC/Information Sciences Institute

Jeff Rickel will present 'Steve', an autonomous, animated agent that
cohabits a virtual world with students.
Steve's objective is to help students learn to perform physical, procedural
tasks, such as operating and maintaining complex equipment. He can
demonstrate tasks, explaining his actions, and can monitor students
performing tasks, providing help when they need it.

10.30-11.00am

Refreshment break

11.00-11.30am

Prof. Bruce Blumberg, MIT Media Lab

Prof. Blumberg's group at the MIT Media Lab focuses on the problem of
building interactive animated characters for use in virtual environments
such as immersive story-telling systems, games, and web-based worlds.

11.30-12.00

Prof. Daniel Thalmann

Prof. Thalmann will present his latest research results in the area of
interactive perceptive virtual humans. This will include intercommunication
and emotional interaction between autonomous virtual humans, interaction
between avatars and autonomous agents, and autonomous virtual crowds.

12.00-12.15pm

Open Forum

12.15-2.00pm

Lunch and view exhibits and demonstrations

SESSION 6
Digital Kidnapping?
2.00-4.30pm, with a mid-session refreshment break
Moderator: Prof. Joseph J. Beard, St John's University School of Law

Prof. Joe Beard is, amongst many other things, the leading academic lawyer
specialising in the field of Intellectual Property law as applied to
digital actors. He has assembled for Virtual Humans 3 what is probably the
most distinguished and diversely experienced panel ever convened on this
topic. The speakers will present and discuss their views in what is certain
to be a uniquely well-informed and lively debate.

The participant list will include Richard Masur, President of the Screen
Actors Guild, as well as the following:

- Edward H. Rosenthal is a partner in the New York City law firm of Garbus,
Klein and Selz, P.C., where he specializes in intellectual property
litigation and counselling. He is a member of the NY City Bar Association's
Committee on Trademarks and Copyrights, and an officer of the Copyright
Society of the USA.  

- Jeffrey Lotman is the Chief Executive Officer of Global Icons, a company
specializing in the licensing and marketing of celebrity images. He is a
member of the Artists Rights Foundation, and author of a two-volume
reference work on animation art. 

- Peter Riva, the grandson of Marlene Dietrich, heads up an international
idea brokerage agency that he started in 1972, in London. His wide ranging
activities and interests currently include co-creation and co-ownership of
'Wild Things', now in first run syndication with Paramount Pictures
Television; presidency of The International Film History Foundation;
Managing Directorship of four Marlene Dietrich corporations; and an
advisory role with
the African Fund for Endangered Wildlife. 

- Steve Williams played a central role in the growth of Industrial Light &
Magic into one of the world's major digital production facilities. He was
Chief Animator on 'The Abyss', 'The Hunt for Red October', 'Terminator 2:
Judgement Day', and 'Jurassic Park', Director of Animation on 'The Mask',
for which he received an Oscar nomination, and Animation Supervisor on
'Star Wars Special Edition'. He is currently a founding partner in Pull
Down Your Pants, a feature film, commercial and music video production
company. 

- Ronald Fields, the grandson of W.C. Fields, is a best-selling author,
Emmy Award winning producer, and screenwriter. His widely varied background
and activities include a period as a comic strip writer for the Los Angeles
Times Syndicate, librettist for the musical 'Left Out', scheduled to debut
in June 1998, writer of the 'W.C. Fields CD-ROM Golf Game', guest
appearances on 'The Tonight Show starring Johnny Carson', and numerous
lectures and workshops on creative writing. 

4.30pm

Closing Remarks
Dr Sandra K. Helsel
Conference Director

-------end------
Elisabeth Roche Roche Internet Resources and Research Tucson, AZ
for VRNews and VH3 June, 1998 | (520)320-5933 eroche at sisnaaz.com