Prof. Carol O’Sullivan is the Coordinator of the VERVE project. She is the
Professor and Chair of Visual Computing in Trinity College Dublin. Her research interests encompass computer graphics, animation, perception, human and crowd simulation.

Jan Ondrej is a postdoctoral research fellow in GV2 group at Trinity College Dublin. His research interests are in computer graphics and virtual reality, especially in a realistic simulation and animation of autonomous virtual humans.

Rowan Hughes is a PhD student. His research interests are in computer graphics, virtual reality and sketch based interfaces.

Fiona Newell is a Professor in the School of Psychology and Institute of Neuroscience, Trinity College Dublin. Her research interests are in human sensory and perceptual processes. The main goal of her research is to provide a better understanding of how information is shared across the senses and to elucidate the brain processes involved in the perception of objects, faces and places across the main human sensory systems. Her recent research has focused on a more life-span approach, particularly on how the ageing process affects multisensory perception and spatial cognition.

Eugenie Roudaia is a post-doctoral fellow in the Trinity College Institute of Neuroscience and is interested in visual and multisensory perception and how perceptual function changes with ageing, as well the interaction between perceptual function and balance in older age. She is also very interested in perceptual learning and brain plasticity across the lifespan. In her research she employs a combination of behavioural, psychophysical, and neuroimaging techniques.

Niamh Merriman is a PhD Student in School of Psychology and Institute of Neuroscience whose research interests include the study of multisensory integration and spatial cognition in healthy older adults and fall-prone older adults. She will investigate the impact of dynamic audio-visual information on different aspects of older adults’ spatial cognition under ecologically valid conditions using virtual reality. The over-arching goal of this research is to inform rehabilitative interventions for those with impaired spatial cognition.

Hugh Nolan is a PhD student at the Trinity Centre for Bioengineering whose research deals with recording the neural correlates of vestibular perception coming from true motion stimuli. Using an EEG system installed on a motion simulation platform, he is investigating vestibular perception and multisensory integration. He is also interested in developing new methods for processing and analysing EEG and other bio signals.

Philippe Robert is Coordinator of the Memory Resource and Research Centre (CMRR) of the University Hospital in Nice. His area of interest is Ageing, specifically Alzheimer’s Disease – Behavioural and psychological disturbances (BPSD) – autonomy – techniques for the detection and analysis of behaviour.

Arnaud Dechamps’ focus is in learning and autonomy maintenance processes has several publications in autonomy and old adults and adapted intervention. His main research interests are systemic behavioural modelling, behavioural and cognitive disturbances, dementia and autonomy, independent living and assistance through ICT. He is particularly interested in social interaction and the role of beliefs in personal agency.

Pierre-David Petit’s main research interests in the field of applied physiology and sport science include the study of the effects of programs of prevention and education for health by physical and sporting activities.

The research interests of George Drettakis focus on 3D computer graphics. In particular, George has worked extensively on shadows and global illumination, visibility algorithms and 3D sound. More recently he has concentrated on interactive rendering, image-based rendering and relighting, texture synthesis and virtual reality.

Rachid Guerchouche is a Ph.D. in Computer Science. His field of expertise is computer vision and image processing. Currently, he is working on the VERVE European project as R&D engineer and local project manager. His research interests include the acquisition and display of real-world environments from photographs and video (IBR), 3D sound and the development of authoring tools for immersive environments.

Adrien Bousseau does research on image creation and manipulation, with a focus on 2D images (drawings and photographs). He recently worked on drawing tools for designers and on image processing algorithms to manipulate lighting in a photograph.

Emmanuelle Chapoulie is a PhD Student who works with gestures interaction in virtual reality.

Gaurav Chaurasia is a second year PhD student at INRIA Sophia Antipolis (REVES group). His main research interests are image-based rendering, image warping and texture synthesis and whose involvement in the VERVE project is related to developing interactive image-based rendering solutions for stereo applications.

Charles Verron’s research interests include sound synthesis and spatialization for virtual reality and music applications.

Jorge Lopez-Moreno is a PhD in Computer and Systems Engineering whose research career is focused in Computer Graphics and Vision. His area of expertise is image processing, analysis and editing: light source detection, shape estimation, visual perception, intrinsic images, NPR and visual effects.

Adrien David is a Research Engineer, Rendering and Virtual Environments.

Sylvain Duchene’s research interests are currently focussed on image based rendering and lighting manipulation in urban environment. His previous experience was about stereo perception, photorealistic rendering and pre visualization tools.

Pierre-Yves Laffont is a PhD Student at INRIA Sophia-Antipolis and his research focuses on intrinsic images, image editing, image-based rendering and relighting, with geometric cues from multi-view reconstruction. For the VERVE project, he developed a method for removing lighting information (i.e. shading and shadows) from photographs, thus allowing creation of “lighting-free” images that could be used for presenting a virtual environment at a different time of day (e.g., evening or night) based only on a single lighting condition capture.

Catherine Pelachaud’s interests lie in the modelling of Embodied Conversational Agents; in particular of their expressive nonverbal behaviours. Within VERVE she is focusing on the behavioural characteristics of virtual agents with different individual profiles. She is also interested in developing agents interacting with users in an emotion-coloured manner.

Ken Prepin’s research interest includes Embodied Conversational Agents, inter-subjectivity, emergence of non-verbal synchrony during dialogue and coupling between dynamical systems. These researches concentrate on the question of “how can we conciliate the use of a representation based language (with meanings, goals, beliefs) and the physical dynamical coupling that agents communicating create mutually (synchrony, feeling of sharing)?”. This main issue is addressed focusing on the mutual feeding between representations and dynamics.

Anne-Claire Conneau’s work goal is to automatically analyse the emotional state of people with disabilities while they are immersed in virtual environments created for them to improve their condition. It will be based on the processing and fusion of the various signals, be it the audio-visual stimuli presented to the patient, or the signals captured by the different audio-visual, motion and biological sensors (including EEG/ECG electrodes) used to monitor him. The emotions will be naturally expressed by real users which permit us to go beyond the prototypical emotional states and consider a large variety of emotions.

Slim Essid’s area of interest is machine learning for multi-modal signal processing, especially discriminative learning methods, Kernel methods, Probabilistic graphical models. With applications to; Joint audio-visual processing and multimedia content analysis, Music Information Retrieval (MIR), Human activity analysis and emotion recognition, Physiological, in particular EEG, signal processing

Nguyễn Văn Hạnh’s research is directed toward analyzing the outcomes of Virtual Reality Technology and Embodied Conversational Agent (ECA) for functional rehabilitation. Specifically, he investigates how virtual factors (Virtual Environment factors, ECA factors) can impact on interaction with human users in functional rehabilitation procedure. He is also interested in analyzing the relation among Real-Human- based, ECA-based and Humanoid-Robot- based in interaction with human users and patients.

Gaël Richard’s research interests are mainly in the field of speech and audio signal processing and include topics such as Signal representations and signal models (Subspace methods, sparse representation, atomic decomposition, Non Negative Matrix factorisation,…), Audio and musical signal Indexing, Audio coding, Audio source separation and spatial audio, Speech processing, Emotional Speech analysis and speech synthesis, Multimedia signal segmentation and processing.

Isabelle Viaud-Delmon is a CNRS research scientist in neuropsychology. She is working in the Acoustic and Cognitive Spaces Team at IRCAM (Paris). Her research area of interest includes the study of multisensory integration and spatial orientation both in patients and normal subjects, with virtual reality techniques integrating spatial audition. She also conducts research to develop new approaches based on technologies related to interactive sound rendering in an effort to improve rehabilitation for neurological and psychiatric patients.

Marine Taffou is a PhD Student in Cognitive Neurosciences whose research interests focus on the relationship between auditory-visual integration and emotion in Virtual Reality. She investigates how auditory and visual information combines to trigger different intensities of affective reactions in subjects, in order to propose innovative treatments to phobic patients.

Brian Gannon works at Kainos, a privately-owned technology company, leading the consulting practice in healthcare and financial services, and advising senior management in NHS hospitals and charities in England and Wales. He teaches at the University of London, where he is a Visiting Fellow at the School of Business, Economics and Informatics. His research interests include Electronic Medical Records, particularly in Oncology and Acute Hospitals. Other research focuses on the social, organisational and economic aspects of Information Systems.

Ivan Orvieto, being one of the founders of Testaluna, leads the department of R&D projects with aim of creating serious games for learning, training and therapeutic purposes. His main interest is in combining technology and creativity of games towards supporting people in various aspects of life.

Matteo Romagnoli designs and develops videogames, simulations, and virtual communities combining high quality entertainment with training, educational, therapeutic or promotional purposes.

Prof. Diego Gutierrez leads the Graphics and Imaging Lab at the Universidad de Zaragoza. The lab’s research focuses on computer graphics, with a particular interest in rendering algorithms, computational photography and applied perception.

Adrián Jarabo focusses on photo-realistic rendering (both offline and real-time), image-based appearance modelling and computational photography.

Elena Garces’ research interests are focused on advance image processing techniques, appearance capture and computational photography.

Professor Philipp Slusallek – Scientific Director at the German Research Centre for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) and his key areas of interest are:

• Realtime Realistic Image Synthesis and Lighting Simulations
• Future 3D-Internet and Server-Based Rendering
• Simulated Reality and Online Worlds
• Combining Computer Graphics and Artificial Intelligence
• Digital Media Applications and Middleware
• High-Performance Parallel and Distributed Computing
• Programming Models and Languages

Kristian Sons is researcher at the DFKI and lead of the 3D-Internet project XML3D. His research interests include 3D-Internet technologies and standards including portable shading, authoring of complex 3D environments and re-usability of 3D components.

Hilko Hoffmann’s research interests are Virtual Reality systems and applications, collaborative virtual environments, interaction methods for immersive virtual environments and virtual humans especially for industrial simulations.

Johannes Ebersold recently started as a software engineer at the DFKI and is interested in the technologies of the 3D-Internet domain, such as XML3D.

Sergiy Byelozyorov’s research interests are Web, Virtual Environments, and 3D Graphics.