Keynote Speakers

Prof. Kenny Mitchell 

Title: Delivering Interactive Emotional Avatars with Everyone

Abstract: TBA

Short bio: Prof. Kenny Mitchell is the Technical Director of Rendering at Roblox, and a Professor of Computing at Edinburgh Napier University. Dr. Mitchell has been involved in various video games, movies, and consumer products, including “Star Wars: Rogue One”, “Pirates of the Caribbean”, or “Finding Dory”; and has over 40 patents in computer graphics and motion capture. Prof. Mitchell is an ACM SIGGRAPH Pioneer, an IEEE Senior Member, and a member of BAFTA; and is currently the co-Editor-in-Chief for ACM Games: Research and Practice, the Associate Editor for ACM Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques and Elsevier Computers and Graphics, and is on the Steering Board for InGAME: Innovation for Games.

Associate Professor Anne-Hélène Olivier

Title: Social agents and non-verbal interactions: when Movement Science meets Virtual Reality

Abstract: TBA

Short bio: Anne-Hélène Olivier is an associate professor and a co-director of the master program in adapted physical activity at the University of Rennes 2, in France. She is a researcher scientist at the Movement Sports and Health (M2S) laboratory and in the VirtUs team at Inria. She received her PhD in Sports Sciences (Biomechanics) in 2008 (Univ. Rennes) where her project focuses on the analysis and modeling of human walking and of interactions between pedestrians. During her post-doc fellowship at Inria, she was interested in the interactions between real and virtual walkers, and especially the evaluation of VR to study such interactions. Her current research interests concern both the understanding of non-verbal interactions between people, but also the use of the knowledge about human behavior to improve the design of navigation techniques and populated virtual environments. To this end, she uses an experimental approach both in real and virtual conditions and develops collaborative work within a multidisciplinary research team. She has served as a conference scientific papers chair for the international conferences IEEE VR 2019 (conf. track), EuroVR 2020, ISMAR 2021 (conf. track) and SAP 2021 and will serve this year ISMAR 2023 (conf. track).