INTETAIN 2011

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INTETAIN stands for Intelligent Technologies for Interactive Entertainment. The fourth conference (INTETAIN 2011) was held in Genova, Italy, May 25-27, 2011. Previous conferences were held in Madonna di Campiglio (Italy), Playa del Carmen (Mexico), and Amsterdam (The Netherlands). The INTETAIN conferences intend to stimulate interaction among academic researchers and commercial developers of interactive entertainment systems. The conferences focus on the development of novel user-centered intelligent computational technologies and interactive applications for entertainment, being made possible through the use of a wide range of interactive device technologies (e.g., mobile and wearable devices, home entertainment centers, haptic devices, wall screen displays, information kiosks, holographic displays, fog screens, distributed smart sensors, and immersive displays) and media delivery infrastructures (e.g., multimedia networks, interactive radio, streaming technologies, DVB-T/M, ITV, P2P, satellite broadcasting, UMTS, Bluetooth, Broadband, and VoIP).

Genova turned out to be a beautiful location for an INTETAIN conference. The beautiful Palazzo Ducale with its wonderful staircases was the venue of the conference. It did not only offer a medieval room for the lectures, but also many adjacent rooms where during the breaks demonstrations of Interactive and entertaining installations using camera’s, touch-tables and all kinds of tangibles, were held. A particular treat was the visit to Casa Paganini, home of the InfoMus research lab of the main organizers of the conference, Antonio Camurri and Gualtiero Volpe. Imagine doing motion tracking and experimenting with multimedia technologies in an ex-monastery in rooms decorated with frescos of the 16th century. A special demonstration session was held in Casa Paganini and of course research projects of the InfoMus Lab were presented.

The program of INTETAIN 2011 was varied. Among the technologies that were presented for interactive entertainment were of course augmented reality, brain-computer interfacing, computer vision, smart materials, animation and storytelling. Obviously, there were applications with the Kinect, touch tables. Twenty presentations were scheduled and in addition there posters and demonstrations. A best paper award went to Dennis Reidsma and Herwin van Welbergen of the Human Media Interaction group of the University of Twente for their paper on “Elckerlyc”, a behavior mark-up language realizer for generating multimodal verbal and nonverbal behavior for virtual humans.

Before the conference a free tutorial on EyesWeb could be attended. EyesWeb, developed by InfoMus, is a software environment for developing multimodal, full-body interaction, including expressive gestures. Immediately after the conference a workshop on Social Behavior in Music was organized. This workshop focused on the social signals and their features that are most significant for a qualitative and quantitative analysis of social behavior and experience in music. The papers presented computational models, algorithms, and techniques for the analysis of social behavior in music, their application in concrete test-beds, their evaluation in experimental set-ups, and their exploitation in future scenarios.

During the conference and the workshop keynote talks were given by Oliviero Stock (persuasive technologies), Francois Pachet (musical experience and interactive instruments), and Alessandro Vinciarelli (social signal processing). Add to all these entertaining events delicious snacks during breaks and a social dinner at Terrazze del Ducale. Here the participants could enjoy a wonderful variety of delicious Ligurian fish dishes. It will be hard to match the results of the efforts of the organizers in a next INTETAIN conference in 2013.

About the Author

Anton Nijholt

Professor of computer science

Anton Nijholt started his professional life as a programmer (Algol, Fortran and Basic) at TNO-Delft (The Netherlands Organisation for Applied Scientific Research). Then he decided to study at the Delft University of Technology (mathematics and computer science) and to spend the rest of his life close to computers.