News

• (2019/11/04) The full program of the workshop is now available. Please note that the MARCH workshop will take place between 14.00 and 18.00 on Wednesday 11 December.
• (2019/10/21) All paper notifications have been sent. Thank you for your submissions! Remember that the deadline for camera-ready versions is 28 October.
• (2019/10/08) We're excited to announce that Michael Neff (University of California, Davis) will be an invited speaker at this workshop.
• (2019/09/30) The submission deadline has been extended to 10 October!

Introduction

Digital humans are key aspects of the rapidly evolving areas of virtual reality, augmented reality, virtual production, and gaming. They are becoming more and more commonly used for entertainment, education, health, security, and many other purposes. Modeling and animating digital humans are still challenging tasks that may lead to uncanny results if not properly achieved. Creating crowds and groups of digital humans adds another layer of complexity.

The objective of this Workshop on Modeling and Animating Realistic Crowds and Humans (MARCH) is to present the state of the art and new research perspectives on three key challenges: modeling digital humans, animating them, and creating groups/crowds of autonomous characters. The workshop aims to establish a new platform for the development of virtual human technology at the intersection of Artificial intelligence (AI) and Virtual reality (VR). We expect that the workshop will provide an opportunity for researchers to develop new techniques, and will lead to new collaboration among the participants.

The MARCH workshop will be held as part of the 2nd IEEE International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Virtual Reality (AIVR), which will be held in San Diego on 9-11 December 2019. MARCH will take place during the conference itself as a half-day workshop on 11 December.

Full Program

Date: Wednesday 11 December 2019

14.00-15.45 Part 1: Virtual Humans

• 14.00-14.10 Introduction by Zerrin Yumak and Wouter van Toll
• 14.10-15.05 Keynote by Michael Neff
• 15.05-15.25 Presentation by Zerrin Yumak - Data-driven Gaze Animation using Deep Learning
• 15.25-15.45 Paper presentation - Ubiquitous Virtual Humans: A Multi-Platform Framework for Embodied AI Agents in XR (Arno Hartholt, Sharon Mozgai, Adam Reilly, Wendy Whitcup, Matt Liewer, Ed Fast)

16.15-18.00 Part 2: Virtual Crowds

• 16.15-16.35 Paper presentation - Civil War Battlefield Experience: Historical Event Simulation using Augmented Reality Technology (Vin Nguyen, Kwanghee Jung, Seung-Chul Yoo, Seungman Kim, Sohyun Park, Melissa Currie)
• 16.35-16.55 Paper presentation - Crowd and Procession Hypothesis Testing for Large-Scale Archaeological Sites (Kristin Chow, Jeanette Nicewinter, Aline Normoyle, Clark Erickson, Norman Badler)
• 16.55-17.15 Paper presentation - Implementing Position-Based Real-Time Simulation of Large Crowds (Tomer Weiss)
• 17.15-17.35 Paper presentation - CrowdAR Table - An AR Table for Interactive Crowd Simulation (Wolfgang Hürst, Roland Geraerts, Yiran Zhao)
• 17.35-17.50 Presentation by Wouter van Toll - Crowd Simulation: Overview and Future Challenges
• 17.50-18.00 Closing comments

Scope

This workshop invites researchers to submit original, high-quality research papers related to modeling and animation of humans and/or crowds. Relevant topics include, but are not limited to:

• Modeling and animation of humanoid characters
• Expressive character animation (e.g. face, gaze, gestures, ...)
• ML and deep-learning algorithms for character animation
• Avatars in VR/AR
• Social interaction and groups of virtual humans
• Navigation for autonomous characters
• Crowd simulation

Invited Speaker

Important Dates

• Submission deadline: 30 September 2019 Extended to 10 October 2019
• Notification of acceptance: 15 October 2019 20 October 2019
• Camera-ready deadline: 26 October 2019 28 October 2019
• Conference date: 9-11 December 2019
• Workshop date: 11 December 2019

Instructions for Submission

Authors are invited to submit a technical or position paper of 1 to 4 pages, in double-column IEEE format following the official IEEE Manuscript Formatting guidelines. Please anonymize your submissions, as the workshop uses a double-blind review process.

For each accepted paper, at least one author is expected to register for the IEEE AIVR conference and give a presentation at this workshop.

Accepted papers will be included in the conference proceedings and will appear on IEEE Xplore Digital Library. Also consider the IEEE policies for publications (i.e. you must own the copyright to all parts, and the manuscript must be original work and not currently under review elsewhere).

Papers can be submitted via the EasyChair page for IEEE AIVR, using a specific track for this workshop. Click on the button below to get started. When starting your submission, please make sure to select the track "IEEE AIVR 2019 - Workshop on Modeling and Animating Realistic Crowds and Humans".

Organizing Committee

Program Committee

• Panayiotis Charalambous (Cyprus Institute, Cyprus)
• Roland Geraerts (Utrecht University, Netherlands)
• Ludovic Hoyet (Inria Rennes, France)
• Rachel McDonnell (Trinity College Dublin)
• Nuria Pelechano (Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya)
• Jungdam Won (Facebook AI Research)

Contact

If you have any questions or remarks regarding this workshop, please contact Zerrin Yumak (Z.Yumak[at]uu.nl) or Wouter van Toll (wouter.van-toll[at]inria.fr).