============================================================ GALA (Gathering of Animated Lifelike Agents) at IVA 2008, 1-3 September, Tokyo http://hmi.ewi.utwente.nl/gala/. Call for Participation ============================================================ 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