jbates+@cs.cmu.edu (Joseph Bates) (07/16/90)
In the interest of keeping people informed of work toward VR, below is
a call for participation for a workshop at the National AI conference
this summer on certain kinds of "deep models" for virtual reality.
The time for applying to the workshop is long past, but the call might
be of interest to folks in this newsgroup. At present, no printed
proceedings is planned for the workshop.
Joe Bates
-------------------
Call for Participation
Workshop on
Interactive Fiction and Synthetic Realities
during AAAI-90, July 31 - August 3, 1990
Boston, Massachusetts
A growing number of researchers in government, academia, and industry
are building virtual reality hardware and associated low level software.
What kind of systems must lie behind this raw interface technology to
present engaging, emotional, and dramatic simulated worlds?
The workshop seeks researchers actively studying overall architecture
and component technology for high quality interactive worlds. Areas
of interest include, but are not limited to:
- physical world simulation: physically based modeling for animation,
high level animation control, visual expression of style and emotion,
- mental architectures for agents: cognitive architectures, reactive
agents, representing world knowledge, natural language and speech
processing, social knowledge, emotional modeling, self knowledge,
- computational theories of presentation (analogous to narration
in text or visual technique in film, whereby an intentionally
warped view of the world is presented to the human participants):
controlling focus, mood, and style in natural language text and
speech generation, capturing and applying knowledge from traditional
animation and film production,
- computational theories of drama (to subtly control the flow of events
in the world according to author's intent, while allowing apparent
free will for the human participants): specification of abstract plot,
computational versions of traditional dramatic theories, applications
of adversary search, abstract planning, and plan understanding to
interactive plot generation,
- integrating component technology into complete systems: overall
system architecture, interface standards.
The workshop is intended to bring together researchers studying these
issues, some of whom are explicitly working toward dramatic virtual
reality systems and others who might like to do so. We hope the
workshop will help crystallize these efforts into a recognized research
community.
Format:
Participants in the workshop will be researchers actively studying the
topics listed above. The workshop will focus on long term goals and
current research efforts to achieve those goals. Selected participants
will be invited to present talks.
We expect that the workshop will run for one day. It will be limited
to 25 participants.
Submissions:
Prospective participants should submit a summary of their research
efforts, sufficient to let the organizers understand their goals, the
implications of their research for building dramatic, emotional,
interactive worlds, and the status of their efforts. The summary
should not exceed 4 pages.
Individuals wishing to speak should also submit a 1 page abstract for
a talk of 40 minutes or less. Short talks describing important ideas
are as welcome as longer presentations. Please indicate on the
abstract the amount of time desired. Time allocations for presentations
will be determined by the organizers.
Please send 3 copies of both your summary and abstract to the workshop
chairperson:
Joseph Bates
School of Computer Science
Carnegie Mellon University
Pittsburgh, PA 15213
Include your address, telephone number, and e-mail address.
Submissions must be received by April 1, 1990 to be considered.
Participants will be notified of acceptance by May 15, 1990.
Participants who wish to include material in working notes to be
distributed at the workshop must provide camera ready copy of that
material by June 15, 1990.
Workshop Organizers:
Joseph Bates, Carnegie Mellon University
Brenda Laurel, Interactivist
Andy Witkin, Carnegie Mellon University