Creating and sharing knowledge for telecommunications

Project: GOLEM: Realistic Virtual Humans

Acronym: GOLEM
Main Objective:
The overall objective of GOLEM is to share knowledge between Industry and Academia in order to successfully achieve the following scientific and technological objectives. The main goal of the project is to carry out multidisciplinary research that will result in technology that radically improves the visual appearance and behaviour of virtual characters (avatars), while streamlining the production pipeline and keeping them customizable and affordable. This will have a relevant impact in 1) industries (such as movies or games) 2) academia (by advancing the state of the art in the related research fields) and 3) neuroscience (by using the avatars in novel experiments about presence in virtual environments).

GOLEM encompasses two complementary objectives; the first objective is the development of a novel, optimized pipeline that covers capture, synthesis and animation of realistic virtual humans in real time, which will enhance current state-of-the-art techniques to create virtual humans in fields such as game production or cinematography. It is estimated that its development will save up to 90% of time in the animation process.

Based on the achieved results, the second objective of this project is to conduct novel research on presence in virtual environments.
Reference: 251415
Funding: EU/FP7
Start Date: 01-09-2010
End Date: 01-09-2014
Team: Veronica Costa Teixeira Pinto Orvalho
Groups: Computer Graphics and Interactive Multimedia - Po
Partners: Diego Gutierrez - Universidad de Barcelona, João Orvalho - Wondertalent, Mel Slater - Universidad de Barcelona, Miguel Sales Dias - Microsoft Portugal
Local Coordinator: Veronica Costa Teixeira Pinto Orvalho

Associated Publications