[Ieee_vis] Call for Paper IEEE VR 2025 Workshop on Next Generation Avatar (NGA2025)

[Franck Multon]

Dear colleagues,

we are pleased to announce the first IEEE VR Workshop on "Next 
Generation Avatars", to be help during the IEEE VR 2025 conference, 8-12 
March 2025 in Saint-Malo, France (https://ieeevr.org/2025/). NGA2025 is 
a half-day on-site workshop which focuses on the very last advancement 
in avatar capture, modeling, control, animation, interaction and 
user-studies, with interests also in ethical questions.

*
*

*NGA – Next Generation of Avatars
*

More details can be found here: project.inria.fr/nga2025 
<https://project.inria.fr/nga2025/>

Recent advances in deep learning, neural representations, and 
physics-based character simulation… have contributed to a breakthrough 
in avatar design, simulation, control and rendering. Computer vision now 
enables detailed and accurate pose and shape capture with affordable 
systems (e.g. a single RGB camera) in real-time, and to build 
controllable representations of specific users instead of anonymous 
virtual humans. In particular, advances in image-based rendering, such 
as NERF or Gaussian Splatting, also offer new challenges to control high 
quality avatars, opening new questions about avatar control, and its 
impact on human experience in VR. Novel view synthesis based on sparse 
views of the user may be a promising alternative to traditional 
character simulation, especially in teleoperation and telepresence 
applications, among many others. Furthermore, motion control including 
retargeting and interaction are still open and difficult problems, that 
may benefit from the above-mentioned new representations. How to 
retarget the motion of the user on an avatar simulated with these new 
representations? In traditional rendering pipelines, how to benefit from 
new information, such as the surface of the user, to adapt the pose of 
the avatar in real-time? Alternatively, how to control this avatar, with 
all the possible representations, using only a few sensors (e.g. 
controllers, inertial sensors…)? All these new possibilities may have 
various impacts on the user experience. How can new representations, new 
control metaphors or devices, and new ways of doing character 
simulation, enhance the VR experience of users? How can we evaluate 
these new methods to measure the degree of interaction, embodiment, 
agency, and impact? What are the potential risks and limitations of 
these approaches from the user perspective? The goal of the workshop is 
to discuss different aspects of the most recent works in this domain, 
and explore how it would impact future research in VR. After scientific 
presentations, showcasing the latest research advances in avatar 
representation, simulation and control, a round table will help to 
imagine the next generation of avatars, and their impact on user 
experience.

We call for submissions of research papers and technical notes (4-8 
pages) or position papers and work-in-progress research abstracts (2-3 
pages) on the following topics:

§Avatar modeling,

§Avatar simulation,

§Avatar control,

§Avatar rendering,

§User experience with avatars,

§Interaction paradigms with avatars,

§Ethics, GDPR and regulations related to avatar use

Accepted papers will be presented in scientific sessions, encouraging 
interaction with the audience (15 minutes talk + 15 minutes discussion) 
to help imagining the future trends of avatar modeling, representation, 
control and interaction. A round table composed of selected contributors 
will conclude the workshop: “Next Generation of Avatars: promises and 
limits”.

All the submissions should follow the IEEE Computer Society VGTC 
conference format 
(*https://tc.computer.org/vgtc/publications/conference/* 
<https://tc.computer.org/vgtc/publications/conference/>).

Submissions must be camera-ready. NGA2025 uses double-blind reviewing, 
so please remove all personal data, such as author names and affiliation 
from all your submission files.

  Papers should be submitted thanks to the Easychair system:

https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=nga2025 
<https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=nga2025>

Important dates:

§Submission deadline: January 10, 2025

§Notification: February 3, 2025

§Camera-ready deadline : February 21, 2025

§Workshop date : March 8-9, 2025

Organizers:

§Franck Multon, Inria, franck.multon at inria.fr 
<mailto:franck.multon at inria.fr> (contact)

§Ludovic Hoyet, Inria, ludovic.hoyet at inria.fr 
<mailto:ludovic.hoyet at inria.fr>

§QuentinAvril, InterDigital, Quentin.Avril at InterDigital.com 
<mailto:Quentin.Avril at InterDigital.com>

§Victoria Fernández Abrevaya,Max Planck Institute for Intelligent 
Systems, victoria.abrevaya at tuebingen.mpg.de 
<mailto:victoria.abrevaya at tuebingen.mpg.de>

-- 
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MULTON Franck
Senior Researcher, Inria

Leader of MimeTIC INRIA Team common with M2S Lab, University Rennes2

Centre de recherche INRIA Rennes - Bretagne Atlantique
Campus de Beaulieu
35042 Rennes Cedex
FRANCE
web :http://www.irisa.fr/mimetic
tel : +33 631646357
mail :fmulton at irisa.fr
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