The conference committee will award a prize to the best demonstration. This prize, the Eyetop eyewear integrating a high resolution screen, is sponsored by the Immersion company.

We are pleased to announce that the proceedings of the conference will be published in Springer's renowned Lecture Notes in Computer Science.

The conference is composed of 3 one-hour keynote lectures presented by international experts, 16 thirty-minute scientific presentations, 11 posters selected by the international programme committee and demonstrations

"Building virtual actors who can really act"

Professor in the Department of Computer Science, and Director of the New York University Media Research Laboratory and Center for Advanced Technology.

Ken Perlin's research interests include graphics, animation, and multimedia.
In 2002 he received the NYC Mayor's award for excellence in Science and Technology and the Sokol award for outstanding Science faculty at NYU. In 1997 he won an Academy Award for Technical Achievement from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for his noise and turbulence procedural texturing techniques, which are widely used in feature films and television.
In 1991 he received a Presidential Young Investigator Award from the National Science Foundation.
Dr. Perlin received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from New York University in 1986, and a B.A. in theoretical mathematics from Harvard University in 1979. He was Head of Software Development at R/GREENBERG Associates in New York, NY from 1984 through 1987. Prior to that, from 1979 to 1984, he was the System Architect for computer generated animation at Mathematical Applications Group, Inc., Elmsford, NY. TRON was the first movie for which his name got onto the credits. He has served on the Board of Directors of the New York chapter of ACM/SIGGRAPH, and currently serves on the Board of Directors of the New York Software Industry Association.

The conference committee will award a prize to the best scientific paper.
This prize, sponsored by the nVidia corporation, is one of the highest-end graphics board manufactured by the company. The specification of the graphics board is not yet available.
The criteria for the prize include the originality, significance and technical strength of the paper as well as the quality of the presentation during the conference.

"Seizing the Power: Animation and Realtime Hardware"

Kevin Bjorke is Shading Engineer and evangelist for developer marketing and content development at NVIDIA Corporation. He was involved intimately with the creation and use of the Cg shading language and CgFX format for realtime shading. He has created numerous shaders, sample scenes, tutorials, educational talks, lab classes, online videos, tools. He has visited and interfaced with a wide variety of production studios in both the film and game industries. He worked with the software and architecture groups of NVIDIA to bring high-end 3D rendering capabilities into realtime hardware. He has lectured at many graphics developer events around the US and the world including Siggraph 2002, Game Developer's Conference 2003, Developer Deep Fry Austin, Iron Developer Tokyo, Gathering 2 and Dawn to Dusk London. He contributed to the book The Cg Tutorial, and worked directly with the providers of CAD and DCC tools (such as Maya, SolidWorks, 3DStudio Max, and SoftImage XSI) to ensure that high-quality realtime shading was available at every 3D artist's desktop around the world. Previously, he supervised lighting, camera work, shading and imaging for The Animatrix, Final Fantasy, and similarly contributed to the films A Bug's Life and Toy Story.

"The Art of Mixing Realities"

Sally Jane Norman is a performing arts theorist and practitioner, Docteur d’état (Institute of Theatre Studies, Paris III), author of numerous papers including new media studies commissioned by UNESCO and the French Ministry of Culture, involved since 1996 in EU R&D programmes (esprit and IST), director of experimental platforms testing creative use of digital tools in live performance (International Institute of Puppetry, Charleville-Mézières ; Studio for Electro-Instrumental Music, Amsterdam ; Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie, Karlsruhe ; European Festival of Young Digital Creation, Valenciennes ; Ecole supérieure de l’image, Angoulême). Director General of the Ecole supérieure de l'image, Angoulême/ Poitiers, she directs the " Digital Arts " doctoral programme linking ESI with the Universities of Poitiers and La Rochelle in the Poitou-Charentes region.