10. November 2008 by admin.

September 3 - 5, 2009

CNAM, Paris, France

http://www.entertainmentcomputing.org/icec2009/

Sponsored by International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP)

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We invite you to participate at the prestigious 8th International Conference on Entertainment Computing (ICEC2009). Entertainment has been taking very important parts in our life by refreshing us and activating our creativity. Recently by the advancement of computers and networks new types of entertainment have been emerging such as video games, entertainment robots, and network games. Based on the very successful preceding workshop and conferences, the next ICEC2009 has been set up to offer an occasion to exchange experience and knowledge among researchers and developers in the field of entertainment computing.

Important Dates:

ICEC 2009 Tutorial Proposals: 23rd February 2009
Full Paper Submissions: 2nd March 2009
Decisions on Full Paper Submissions: 30th March 2009
Short Paper, Poster and Demo Submissions: 20th April 2009
Decisions on Short Paper, Poster and Demo Submissions: 4th May 2009
Camera Ready Submissions for all Papers: 1st June 2009

Conference Topics:

Suggested research topics include, but are not limited to:

· l Interactive Design for Entertainment

· Aesthetics, Ontology and Social Reflection

· Art, Design and Novel Media

· Augmented, Virtual and Mixed Reality

· Computer Games and Game Based Interfaces

· Education, Training, and Edutainment Technologies

· Entertainment and Healthcare

· Novel and Evolutionary Platforms / Hardware Devices

· Social and Human Factors of Entertainment

· Interactive Digital Storytelling, and Interactive Tele-Vision

· Mobile Entertainment via e.g. Mobile Phones, PDAs etc

· Narrative Environments and Intelligent Medias

· New Genres, New Standards

· Pervasive Entertainment and Game-Playing

· Robots and Cyber Pets

· Self Reflecting Entertainment

· Simulation Applications of Games, and Military Training

· Sound, Music, Creative Environments

· Real time and Interactive Technologies for entertainment (Graphics, Sound, AI…)

Artworks:

We are planning a dedicated Art Exhibition. Confirmation and details of this event will be published soon!

Proceedings:

The proceedings of ICEC2009 will be published Springer in the series of Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS).

ICEC2009 Committee:
General Conference Chair:

Stephane Natkin (CNAM/ENJMIN, France)

Progam Committee Co-Chairs:

Stephane NATKIN (CNAM/ENJIM, France)
Masayuki NAKAJIMA (Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan)
Bras BUSHMAN (University of Michigan, USA)

International Steering Committee:

Ryohei Nakatsu (National University of Singapore, Singapore)
Mark Cavazza (University of Teesside, UK)
Zhigeng Pan (Zhejiang University, China)
Stephane Natkin (CNAM/ENJIM, France)
Matthias Rauberberg (Technical University of Eindhoven, The Netherlands)
Don Marinelli (Carnegie Mellon University, USA)
Hyun Yang (KAIST, Korea)
Roy Ascott (University of Plymouth, UK)
Sara Diamond (Ontario College of Art and Design, Canada)
Scott Fischer (USC, USA)

Organizing Committee:

Chair：Ben Salem (Technical University of Eindhoven, The Netherlands)
Stephane Gros (CNAM, France)
Xan Qiu Hou (CNAR, France)

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10. November 2008 by admin.

FYI, the IGF 2009 student competition is closing on November 15th, 2008:

Submit here

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10. November 2008 by admin.

I was surprised to find out how little information there is about Media Design Documents on the web. I posted the following for my prototyping students.  They prototyping a game in 22 weeks, following a rough version of a game company’s production cycle:

Media Design Document

The Media Design Document or MDD is your opportunity to specify the artistic expectations of the games. It’s similar to a packing list before a big trip. You are trying to identify all the visual and audio assets that will be created or purchased for the game. Like much of the documentation in the game development and project management world, the Media Design Document does not have a set format. At the minimum, here’s what the document should contain:

• A list of all art (2D art, 3D models, environments, etc)
• A list of all sounds
• The relationship of those objects to the game

One of the benefits of the media design document is that it helps to clarify your design document. Once upon a time games were built by little teams and the experience could be spec’d in a neat little document. The art might have even been created by the same person who coded the game and perhaps authored the sound and music. As you know this isn’t true anymore. For some, large AAA teams putting everything about the game into a single design document is too much. Instead the content is divided into a few logical parts:

• Design
• Art
• Development

This is similar to the pattern maintained by other software projects. In website development, for example, there might be a business spec, a development spec and an asset spec. In both cases, there might also be one person responsible for each high-level focus. The game design would be responsible for the Design Document, the Art lead for the MDD, and the development lead for the development spec. The titles and specific of jurisdiction change, but the general concept is the same.

As current cross-company research indicates it is not practical to expect to spec the entire game at the start. As you now, designs change, technical hurdles happen, and the world changes quickly. Trying to do so is like trying to create a packing list for every conceivable situation. What’s most reasonable is to plan to the best of your ability and understand there is a slight margin of error. At least we hope the margin of error is slight.

For your media design document you must answer the basic questions:

• What assets will I need for the scope I have determined?
• Can I re-use any of those assets (e.g. retexture the same models for variety)

You will follow the media design document with a rough Art-Pipeline. We will talk more about the Art-Pipeline in the following week, but here is a preview of what you will be working toward. If the Media Design Document is your packing list, the art-pipeline is your road map. It is a workflow document for integrating all your assets and specifying how those assets should be authored (e.g. texture sizes, polycounts,etc)

The rest of the content is here http://aii.LGrace.com/html/week6_Media_Design_Doc.htm

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10. November 2008 by admin.

More information about CASA09, similar to what I posted before:

Computer Animation and Social Agents (CASA 09)

http://hmi.ewi.utwente.nl/CASA09

June 17-19 2009, Amsterdam

Call For Papers

The Human Media Interaction (HMI) department of the University of Twente in the Netherlands and the Computer Graphics Society (CGS) are pleased to announce the 22nd Annual Conference on Computer Animation and Social Agents (CASA 2009) to be held on June 17-19, 2009 in “Het Trippenhuis”, Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

CASA is the leading international conference in the field of computer animation and social agents. CASA 2009 will provide great opportunities to interact with leading experts, share your own work, and educate yourself through exposure to the research of your peers from around the world. In addition, make friends and experience wonderful Amsterdam. The conference venue is located on one of the famous canals of Amsterdam.

We are seeking regular full papers, short papers, and posters with the following topics, but which are not limited to:

Animation Techniques : Motion Control, Motion Capture and Retargeting, Path Planning, Physics based Animation, Image based Animation, Behavioral Animation, Artificial Life, Deformation, Facial Animation, Multi-Resolution and Multi-Scale Models, Knowledge-based Animation, Motion Synthesis;

Social Agents: Social Agents and Avatars, Emotion and Personality, Virtual Humans, Autonomous Actors, AI based Animation, Social and Conversational Agents, Inter-Agent Communication, Social Behavior, Gesture Generation, Crowd Simulation;

Other Related Topics: Animation Compression and Transmission, Semantics and Ontologies for Virtual Humans/Environments, Animation Analysis and Structuring, Anthropometric Virtual Human Models, Acquisition and Reconstruction of Animation Data, Level of Details, Semantic Representation of Motion and Animation, Medical Simulation, Cultural Heritage, Interaction for Virtual Humans, Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality, Computer Games and Online Virtual Worlds.

All accepted full papers, about 35 of them, will be published, at the time of the conference, in a special issue of The Journal of Computer Animation and Virtual Worlds by Wiley. Short papers and posters will be published as CD or hardcopy proceedings with ISBN.

Important Dates are:

Full papers

*Submission: February 10, 2009

*Notification of acceptance: March 10, 2009

*Camera ready: April 1, 2009

Short papers and Posters

*Submission: March 15, 2009

*Notification of acceptance: April 15, 2009

*Camera/CD ready: May 10, 2009

Conference Chair: Anton Nijholt, anijholt@cs.utwente.nl

Program Chairs: Nadia Magnenat-Thalmann, Mark Overmars, and Scott King

Local Chairs: Arjan Egges and Herwin van Welbergen

Webpage: http://hmi.ewi.utwente.nl/CASA09

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