MARCH: Modeling and Animating Realistic Crowds and Humans (2020)
Workshop in 3rd IEEE International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Virtual Reality (AIVR)
17 December 2020, Online (hosted in Utrecht, The Netherlands)
Embedded Files
News
News
The recordings of the talks can be found in our YouTube channel.
(2020/11/13) The full program of the workshop is now online. MARCH will take place on Thursday 17 December 2020.
(2020/09/14) The submission deadline has been extended to 4 October.
(2020/08/04) We're pleased to announce that Rachel McDonnell will be an invited speaker at the workshop.
(2020/07/16) Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the AIVR 2020 conference and its workshops will take place fully online. The conference will now take place during the full week of 14-18 December, and MARCH will remain a half-day workshop.
(2020/05/28) We are excited to host a new edition of the MARCH workshop at AIVR 2020. More information will be added to this website soon. For reference, the website of the 2019 edition of MARCH is still available.
Introduction
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 IEEE-MARCH workshop will be held as part of the 3rd IEEE International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Virtual Reality (AIVR), which will be hosted in Utrecht (The Netherlands) on 14-18 December 2020. Due to the COVID-19 situation, the conference and the workshops will be held fully online. MARCH will take place during the conference itself as a one-day workshop.
Full Program
Full Program
Date: Thursday 17 December 2020. All times are in CET (UTC+1, Dutch winter time).
13.30-15.30 Part 1: Virtual Humans
13.30-13.40 Introduction
13.40-14.30 Keynote - Appealing Virtual Humans (Rachel McDonnell)
14.30-14.50 Paper presentation - Avatars Rendering and its Effect on Perceived Realism in Virtual Reality (Alejandro Ríos, Nuria Pelechano)
14.50-15.10 Paper presentation - Comfort of Aircraft Seats for Customers of Size using Digital Human Model in Virtual Reality (Sarath Surendranadha Panicker, Toon Huysmans)
15.10-15.30 Presentation - Music-Driven Expressive Gesture Animations (Alysha Bogaers, Zerrin Yumak, Anja Volk)
15.30-17.30 AIVR conference session, no workshop activity
17.30-19.30 Part 2: From Individuals to Crowds
17.30-18.00 Presentation - PRESENT and CLIPE Projects (Anne-Hélène Olivier, Julien Pettré)
18.00-18.20 Paper presentation - Virtual Reality to Study Pedestrian Wayfinding: Motivations and an Experiment on Usability (Giuseppe Vizzari)
18.20-18.40 Paper presentation - A Virtual Reality Framework for Human-Virtual Crowd Interaction Studies (Michael Nelson, Christos Mousas)
18.40-19.00 Paper presentation - Plane-Based Local Behaviors for Multi-Agent 3D Simulations with Position-Based Dynamics (Ritesh Sharma, Tomer Weiss, Marcelo Kallmann)
19.00-19.20 Presentation - Where To Go from Here? Towards a Holistic Navigation Model for Crowd Simulation (Wouter van Toll)
19.20-19.30 Closing comments
Registration
Registration
The MARCH workshop will be an on-line video meeting during one day of the AIVR conference. If you register for the full conference, you get access to the MARCH workshop and to all other conference sessions. There is no separate registration procedure for the workshop itself.
Click here to see the registration instructions on the AIVR website.
Invited Speaker
Invited Speaker
Rachel McDonnell (Trinity College Dublin)
Title: The Rise of the Virtual Human
Abstract: Computer generated virtual humans play an important role in many 3D graphical applications, and are often used to evoke empathic responses from human users, due to their human form and behaviour. Recent advancements in computer graphics techniques allow photorealism to be achieved in real-time, where characters are almost indistinguishable from their real counterparts. These characters will be commonplace in more applications in the future, ranging from virtual reality and telepresence to chatbots for marketing, customer service, and even healthcare. However, it is still unclear whether realistic depictions are necessary or even desired by human users. In fact, negative reactions to high levels of realism are common and have been attributed to many factors including incongruence between their motion, appearance, behaviour and speech. Cartoon representations are often used to ensure a positive response, but there are additional considerations to be made when using these types of characters also. This talk will present some of our research on the perception of virtual humans, investigating the individual parameters that affect appeal such as realism, lighting, geometry, materials, behaviour, etc.
Bio: Dr. Rachel McDonnell is an Associate Professor at the School of Computer Science, Trinity College Dublin. She combines research in cutting-edge computer graphics and investigating the perception of virtual characters to both deepen our understanding of how virtual humans are perceived, and directly provide new algorithms and guidelines for industry developers on where to focus their efforts.
Scope
Scope
This workshop invites researchers to submit original, high-quality research papers related to modeling and animation of humans and/or crowds. The workshop welcomes both technical papers and position papers, and authors may also submit work in progress.
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
Important Dates
Important Dates
Submission deadline:
24 September4 October 2020 (Anywhere on Earth)Notification of acceptance: 16 October 2020
Camera-ready deadline: 30 October 2020
Conference date: 14-18 December 2020
Workshop date: 17 December 2020
Submission Instructions
Submission Instructions
Authors are invited to submit a paper of up 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. A link to the appropriate page will be added here when available.
Organizing Committee
Organizing Committee
Utrecht University, The Netherlands
Inria Rennes, France
Inria Rennes, France
Université Rennes 2 / Inria Rennes, France
Program Committee
Program Committee
Panayiotis Charalambous (Cyprus Institute, Cyprus)
Roland Geraerts (Utrecht University, The Netherlands)
Ludovic Hoyet (Inria Rennes, France)
Rachel McDonnell (Trinity College Dublin, Ireland)
Michael Neff (University of California, Davis)
Nuria Pelechano (Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya, Spain)
Jungdam Won (Facebook AI Research)
Contact
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).
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