VHML Workshops

The Virtual Human Markup Language is designed to accommodate the various aspects of Human-Computer Interaction with regards to Facial Animation, Body Animation, Dialogue Manager interaction, Text to Speech production, Emotional Representation plus Hyper and Multi Media information. The text that a Virtual Human is to speak is marked up with tags that direct the character's emotions, gestures and body motion. For Example

<sad>
   You <emph>said</emph> to me once <pause length="short"/>
   that pathos left you unmoved, but that beauty,
   <look-down wait="750ms"/><look-up/>
   <emph affect="b" level="moderate"> mere</emph> beauty,
   could fill your eyes with tears.
</sad>

(128Kb)

More examples can be found here.

The following workshops concerned with VHML or VHML-like languages may be of interest:

NAME DATE VENUE

Talking Head Technology Workshop Finished
November 20th 2001 Perth, Western Australia

IST Concertation VHML Workshop Finished
February
6th, 2002 Bruxelles, Belgium

AAMAS Workshop
(W14) on
Embodied conversational agents
- let's specify and evaluate them!
(Workshop Summary) 16^th July,
2002 Bologna, Italy

HF2002 Workshop
on
Virtual Conversational Characters:
Applications, Methods, and Research Challenges
(Workshop Summary) 29^th November,
2002 Melbourne, Australia

For more information please contact raytrace@talkingheads.computing.edu.au

VHML is being developed as part of the European Union
5^th Framework InterFace project (http://www.ist-interface.org/).