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

Jeffrey Ventrella

September 10, 2007 at 2:30 pm

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

Jeffrey Ventrella

Title: Online Body Language: Expressivity and Identity in Avatars and Autonomous Creatures

Abstract:

Virtual Worlds and 3D online games have made it possible for people to engage socially and build creatively. While advances in visual realism have come a long way, there is much more work to be done in expression, identity, and behavioral realism. I argue that virtual world design needs to focus more on psychology, cinema, and interaction design. Also, unlike film, the simulation arts signify a new way of designing experience, where autonomous entities can engage with human proxies to generate emergent narrative. A glider evolved in cellular automata can have a personality and purpose in its (tiny) life - just as a spring-loaded software toy bird interacting with a user's mouse cursor. The power of gaze, for instance, creates psychological vectors that transcend mundane geometry. Using physical and biological laws to let artificial entities self-animate, I describe how a lively virtual space can be crafted using a minimum of graphical detail. This principle of distilled graphics applies equally to avatars, in which behavioral realism should be equal to or greater than visual realism.

Bio:

MJeffrey Ventrella is a programmer/artist doing virtual world design and artificial life research. Ventrella received his first degree in Art Education/Art History from Virginia Commonwealth University. A love of science, geometry, and animation made programming a logical next step - which led to Syracuse University, where he earned an MFA in Computer Graphics. After working at SU helping researchers with data visualization and teaching CAD courses, Ventrella moved on to UC San Diego where he taught courses briefly, and then bounced back east to get a third degree from the MIT Media Lab. One more bounce landed him in San Francisco where he began working on simulation games and virtual worlds. He became Principle Inventor and second co-founder of There.com, and most recently, Senior Developer at Linden Lab. Ventrella publishes on topics centered around evolutionary computation and creativity. His web page http://www.ventrella.com has links to his papers, Java applets, and free Windows playthings

For further information visit http://www.ventrella.com