The Human Media Interaction (HMI) Department of the Center of Telematics and Information technology (CTIT) of the University of Twente comprises more than forty researchers (including 20 Ph.D. students), working on smart surroundings, ambient intelligence, multimodal interaction, speech and natural language processing, multimedia retrieval, embodied agents, virtual reality, adaptive user interfaces and affective computing, games and entertainment computing. HMI is involved in many European and national projects and Networks of Excellence, and is also responsible for the Master of Science track "Human Media Interaction" with more than fifty students.

In the GATE project HMI is involved in the theme 2 ‘Virtual Characters'. In WP 2.1 on Modeling Motor Behaviour, HMI will analyze real motions, provide computational models and a parameterized animation framework which allows real-time, reactive motion adaptation to changes both in the environment (moving targets, walking on slippery surface) and in the emotional, cognitive or physical state of the agent in question. In WP 2.2 the mental state of virtual characters will be modelled. The emphasis will be on the character's communicative capacities: how does a character infer the mental state of other characters from what it perceives, how does it decide to react by verbal or nonverbal means of communication or by taking other non-linguistic actions? Some of the factors that will be taken into account are personality, emotion and setting.