From: broehl@ece.uwaterloo.ca (Bernie Roehl) Subject: ANNOUNCE: The Virtual Humans Architecture Group Date: Fri, 13 Sep 1996 21:14:20 GMT Message-ID: Organization: University of Waterloo There have been a number of projects and research efforts directed towards the creation of "virtual humans". Virtual humans have wide applicability in such areas as human-factors engineering, feature films, performance animation and multi-user virtual environments. Most of these projects have been self-contained and mutually incompatible. There has been no effective way for researchers in the field to build on each others' work. It is also difficult to produce commercial tools, since no standard exists which would allow such tools to interoperate. The growing market for virtual humans, particularly avatars for use in multi-user environments, makes the need for standards in this area even more pressing. There are now a number of initiatives which are starting to address this need. SAE G13, MPEG-4 SNHC and the Universal Avatars group are all working on different aspects of the difficult problem of creating standards for virtual humans. In order to harmonize these efforts, a new advisory group has been established. The Virtual Humans Architecture Group (V-HAG) is designed to bring together some of the key researchers in the field, with the goal of identifying those areas where commonality across the various standards initiatives is needed, and then co-ordinating efforts to achieve a common standard in those areas. The proposed V-HAG timetable is as follows: 1. Compile a list of the major Virtual Humans implementations and standards along with an architectural overview of each. This goal should be completed by the middle of October of this year. 2. Examine the different systems in detail, and identify those elements that they have in common. A document will be prepared which highlights not only these common elements, but also those unique features which each offers. This document will then be presented to the broader Virtual Humans community, to serve as a basis for further discussion. This goal should be complete by the end of November. 3. Put in place a mechanism by which the entire Virtual Humans community can work towards building a specification for the interchange and interoperability of virtual humans and their sub-systems. This mechanism should be in place by the end of this year, and will center around the v-humans mailing list. The process will be analogous to, and modeled after, the one which was used to define the VRML specification. The goal is to have a draft standard in place by early June, 1997. Membership: The V-HAG membership currently consists of: Prof. Norm Badler - Expert Adviser, representing the SAE G13 Humanoid Software standards activity Abbott Brush - IBM Internet Division, representing the Universal Avatar standards activity Tolga Capin and Igor Pandzic - representing the MPEG-4 SNHC standards activity Prof. Nadia Thalmann - Expert Adviser Mitra - representing the Living Worlds initiative Bernie Roehl - Chairman Other members will be added as needed. Getting Involved: All members of the Virtual Humans community are encouraged to participate in the process in the following ways: * If you are involved in another standardization effort that relates to Virtual Humans in some way, please contact us so that those standards may be represented on the V-HAG. * If you are involved in developing software for creating or applying virtual humans, please submit a description of your overall system architecture to the V-HAG. * Be prepared to participate in the standards process once it begins. There is a web site in place for the V-HAG. The URL is . We look forward to doing some exciting work in the weeks and months ahead. -- Bernie Roehl University of Waterloo Dept of Electrical and Computer Engineering Mail: broehl@sunee.uwaterloo.ca Voice: (519) 888-4567 x 2607 [work] URL: http://sunee.uwaterloo.ca/~broehl/bernie.html