Research Colloquium at SFU’s School of Interactive Arts and Technology in Surrey presents

Athomas Goldberg

November 7, 2007 at 2:30 pm

SFU Surrey Campus, Room 5380 (5th Floor Galleria)

Title: The Quest for Believable Characters in Games

Abstract:

The power of the latest generation of game consoles has enabled game developers to achieve unprecedented levels of complexity in games. With the increase in polygon counts and shader sophistication, the bar for achieving believable character behavior has been set higher than ever. We'll look at the specific challenges that developers face in trying to create games with rich and engaging characters and the approaches EA is taking to breathe life into the characters that inhabit the worlds we create.

Bio:

Athomas Goldberg is currently the Director for Animation & Simulation Technologies at Electronic Arts, Inc. where he oversees the development of EA's central animation technology and provides animation resources and support to EA's game teams around the world. Athomas was formerly the Founder, President and Chief Technology Officer for Improv Technologies, Inc, an animation tools and middleware company, and before that, he was a Research Scientist at New York University's Media Research Laboratory, where, along with Professor Ken Perlin, he developed the Improv Animation System, a tool for creating lifelike interactive animated actors for special effects, animated films and interactive games and applications. He has presented the animation system in many published papers and performed demonstrations at numerous conferences and symposia, including ACM SIGGRAPH (94-99), Hypertext 96, Lifelike Computer Characters (94-96) and the American Association for Artificial Intelligence's Symposium on Interactive Story Systems.