Gesticons for
Expressive Embodied Conversational Characters

Working Meeting jointly organised by the
EU projects NECA, MagiCster and lifeplus,
and the BMBF project Virtual Human

Vienna, 12. Dec. 2003

Location: Österreichisches Forschungsinstitut für Artificial Intelligence (OFAI)
Freyung 6/6, 1010 Wien

Objective:

To appear natural and believable embodied conversational characters must reveal non-verbal behaviour including gestures, and body poses and movements. Reviewing past and ongoing projects in the area shows, however, that yet there is neither a commonly shared set of gestures nor a standardised format for representing their semantics and syntax that could serve as an interface to character animation software. While some researchers base their generation approaches on the results of empirical gesture analysis, application developers seem to simply follow their intuitions when defining gesture repertoires for their characters.

The purpose of this working meeting is to bring together researchers and developers of embodied conversational characters to exchange ideas and experiences regarding the conceptualisation and meaning of gestures, scope, and suitable representation formats that allow for an efficient implementation. The ideal outcome of the working meeting would be a proposal for a "Gesticon" (or at least its epistemological structure) that could be used across characters and applications.

Structure:

The working meeting has two main sessions. The morning session is concerned with stock-taking of approaches followed by projects represented through participants. The afternoon session will be reserved for a constructive discussion on what could become a general "Gesticon". Since we aim at a highly focused event attendance to this working meeting will be on invitation only (i.e., there is no public cfp).

Organisers:

Brigitte Krenn, OFAI

Catherine Pelachaud, IUT de Montreuil - Universite de Paris 8

Thomas Rist, DFKI

Nadia Magnenat-Thalmann, MIRALab / C.U.I., University of Geneva


Logistics:
The meeting will be hosted by OFAI in Vienna. Attendees must pay for their travel and accommodation on their own.


Contact:
Brigitte Krenn
email: brigitte@ofai.at
phone: +43/1/532-46212


Presentations &
online materials


Workshop Summary (pdf)


Check list for presentations


List of participants