PETER M. PLANTEC

  Writer/Digital Artist/Software Designer

Peter Plantec the author of “Virtual Humans – Creating the illusion of personality.” With experience in animation, software development and clinical psychology, Plantec is now a full-time writer and presenter.

Plantec spent 15 years heading The Aspen Stress Management Clinic and Carbondale Family Counseling Center. He also taught numerous seminars at Colorado Mountain College. He went on to cofound Virtual Personalities, Inc, with Dr. Fuzzy Mauldin, father of Lycos. Together they developed the first commercial virtual human interface, “Sylvie.” Sylvie is very smart, can interpret natural languages (several of them) and respond intelligently with dialog or appropriate machine commands. On top of that, she has enough charm and personality to have inspired at least ten fan sites around the world. She even presented Disney with an award at the Annie Awards with no human directing her behavior and dialog. He also taught several animation seminars at Silicon Studios in Santa Monica, CA.

Plantec is currently contributing editor of Studio Magazine and StudioDaily.com in New York and a columnist at VFXWorld.com in Hollywood. Considered a pioneer and authority on virtual human (virtual actor) design, he speaks at conferences and film festivals around the world. For the past four years he has co-hosted the annual Virtual Human’s Forum with Christophe Hery (ILM) at the FMX conference in Stuttgart, Europe’s largest digital entertainment gathering. He also sits on the international advisory boards of FMX and VIEW (Torin, Italy) and has taught master classes in virtual human design at FITA in Angouleme, France. He has recently been consulting on the design of the first virtual human teachers to be used to assist real teachers across the United States.