The CAPTECH'98 workshop took place at the University of Geneva on November 26-27, 1998, sponsored by FIP Working Group 5.10 (Computer Graphics and Virtual Worlds) and the Suisse Romande regional doctoral seminar in computer science. The subject of the conference was ongoing research in data capture and interpretation. The goals of capturing real world data in order to perceive, understand, and interpret them and then reacting to them in a suitable way are currently important research problems. These data can be very diverse: sounds, emotions, shapes, motions, forces, muscles, actions, etc....

Selected topics and papers from the first international workshop on computer animation, held in Geneva in 1989, provide a comprehensive overview of the problems encountered in the rising field of computer animation. To foster interactive links between researchers, end-users, and artists, roundtables and discussions have been included as well as presentations of concepts and research themes such as keyframe to task-level animation, artificial intelligence, natural language and simulation for human animation, choreography, anthropometry for animated human figures, facial animation and...