GALA is an annual festival to showcase the latest Animated Lifelike Agents created by university students and academic or industrial research groups and as launched in 2005.

GALA provides:

• The GALA Final event, to demonstrate the state-of-the-art in the technology of virtual humans.
• The GALA Jury Award for student projects and the GALA Public Award for any entry.
• The permanent GALA Gallery on the web with the best entries exhibited for further study.
• The possibility of an optional short paper (2 pages) publication in the proceedings of the annual IVA conference, published by Springer.

Successful entries of Gala 2010 at 10th International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents are also recorded in the 2010 pages of the GALA gallery.

GALA is the major event for demonstrating your interactive virtual humans, exploiting techniques in real-time graphics, animation, multi-modal interaction, agents, emotion modelling, dialog management and related areas. The quality and interactive capabilities of the animated lifelike agent are to be presented in a short movie (see Submission details).

GALA is different from and complementary to scientific conferences where demonstrations are at most illustrations of talks, often not included in proceedings and thus hard to reproduce. GALA specifically encourages university students at all levels to submit their work prepared in a shorter time, preferably as a project related to their university curriculum, unlike the output of larger-scale research presented at conferences.

Participants tracks:

1. Student Students from any university, individually or as a group, may submit in this track. For each student submission a supervisor should be named, who can be contacted should the jury want to clarify some issues concerning originality of the work or status of the authors. The works submitted in this track must be prepared within a year prior to submission, preferably as a student project related to a university curriculum. However, animated lifelike agents created in the context of a larger research project or industrial application are welcome too, as well as ones made on their developer’s own initiative, i.e. without any background context. In the first case, the contribution of the student to the project as well as the earlier results built upon should be specifically emphasized.
 
2. Other In this track work from academic institutions and industry, as well as from multi-party national or international projects, is welcome.

All submissions are candidates for the short list of entries, to be presented at the final show and to be included in the repository. Submission categories and formal requirements (see below) are identical for both tracks.

Submission categories:

1. Novel Interaction
The animated lifelike agent should interact with the user, but in a way that does not use a keyboard or mouse.  A simple example is to use a video camera or a microphone, but more novel interactions may came from using other input methods, such as wii motes, mobile phone or Microsoft’s new project Natal.  In any case the novelty of the interaction is key.
2. Animated Lifelike Agent Application The animated lifelike agent is developed for an application. The movie shows the animated lifelike agent in the application context. The points of interest are novelty of application, smoothness of interaction, appeal, general design, consistency, etc.
3. Animated Lifelike Agent Creation In this category, a special feature (e.g. lip-sync, body design, facial animation, hand gesturing) of the animated lifelike agent is to be presented. The points of interest are modules or tools used to create certain aspects of animated lifelike agents, in an easy way and convincing quality.

In the last two categories, the embodiment (head/full body, realistic/cartoon-like), the cast of role (e.g.  information provider for the user, actor in interactive drama, educator, chatbot)  and the media (e.g. Virtual reality, PC, palmtop, mobile phone) are open. Novel application domains, designs and media are encouraged. The only restriction is that the animated lifelike agent must have reactive and/or interactive capabilities, as opposed to virtual characters animated for a single purpose (e.g. CG animation for a film, direct usage of Motion Capture). Physical robots are not eligible for GALA.

Submission format

The animated lifelike agent is to be described (with the possibility of inclusion in the IVA2010 proceedings), followed by a (.flv) movie (to be shown at the GALA Final) of 2-4 minutes, in the first round.  The international jury will invite the entries for the second round, to be demonstrated at the GALA Final in public, as well as a high quality version of the video for the GALA presentation.

The submission deadlines are:
30th April - GALA short paper deadline.
28th May - GALA flash video submission deadline.

Submissions should be sent to: .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)
Event Chairs: Laura Pfeifer and Phil Heslop