Entertainment Computing

Special Issue

Virtual Puppetry: New Frontiers of Digital Character Animation

http://www.journals.elsevier.com/entertainment-computing/call-for-papers/


Introduction

Digital puppetry is an important area in computer animation and recent advances in
input devices technology and graphics hardware have enabled animators to directly
act as real-time controllers of characters to be animated. Such new animation paradigm
allowed to overcome the limits of the traditional animation pipeline; offline processes
that could require hours or days of work can be replaced by interactive animation
sessions, where digital puppets can be directly controlled by gestures, body poses,
facial expressions, voice, music and so forth. In this way, virtual characters can be
brought to life in a quicker and easier way; moreover, they can take advantage of
spontaneous and improvised animator’s behaviors, thus making the animations more
realistic and attractive.
The objective of this Special Issue is to invite high state-of-art research
contributions, tutorials, and position papers that address the broad challenges
faced in animating digital characters. Original papers describing completed
and unpublished work not currently under review by any other journal/magazine/
conference/special issue are solicited.


Topics

In the following, topics of primary interest are reported, though other proposals
could be considered.

- Motion capture, body tracking and gestures recognition
- Human and non-human animation
- Motion cloning
- Collaborative puppetry
- Multi-modal digital puppetry
- Physically-based character animation
- Motion analysis, synthesis and classification
- Applications and case studies


Submission details

All the papers should be full journal length versions and follow the guidelines set
out by Entertainment Computing (http://www.journals.elsevier.com/entertainment-computing/).
Manuscripts should be submitted online by using the online submission and editorial
system for the journal available at http://ees.elsevier.com/entcom/. After the login,
authors have to select an article type. In the drop down menu “Choose Article Type”
authors should choose the option “Special Issue: Virtual Puppetry”. Submission system
will open on February 1, 2014. For any other information, please contact the Guest Editors.


Important dates (tentative)

- Paper submission: March 15, 2014
- Results of the first round of reviews: June 15, 2014
- Revisions: July 31, 2014
- Final decision: September 15, 2014
- Publication of special issue: December 2014


Guest Editors

Prof. Andrea Sanna, Dip. Automatica e Informatica, Politecnico di Torino, Italy (andrea.sanna@polito.it)
Prof. Fabrizio Lamberti, Dip. Automatica e Informatica, Politecnico di Torino, Italy (fabrizio.lamberti@polito.it)