Our relationship with virtual entities is deepening. Already, we are using technologies like Siri, Alexa and Google Assistant to aid in day-to-day tasks. The EU-funded PRESENT project will develop a virtual digital companion, which will not only sound human but also look natural, demonstrate emotional sensitivity, and establish meaningful dialogue. Advances in photorealistic computer-generated characters, combined with emotion recognition and behaviour, and natural language technologies, will allow these virtual agents to not only look realistic but respond like a human. The project will demonstrate a set of practical tools, a pipeline and an application programming interface.

PRESENT (Photoreal REaltime Sentient ENTity) was a Horizon 2020 program running from 2019 to 2022.
I led the research for CREW, focusing on real-time avatars, small crowd simulations and non-verbal communication.
Delirious Departures is a demonstration of this research, presented at SIGGRAPH.
Partners were Cubic Motion / Epic Games, Framestore, UPF, Inria, Braisntorm, Infocert and University of Augsburg.
https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/856879

delirious departures

VANDEBROECK Isjtar, JORIS Eric (2022). Delirious Departures. ACM
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