GOLEM will share knowledge between relevant partners in Industry and Academia in order to carry out multidisciplinary research to streamline the production pipeline for virtual (digital) characters. It will radically improve their appearance and animation, while keeping them affordable and easy to customize. A unique aspect of GOLEM is that its technological and engineering advances will be used throughout the project to carry out research in the field of presence in virtual environments, and this will, in turn, provide feedback to improve and refine the technical aspects. The technical objectives can summarized as development of a marker-less facial capture system, an automatic rigging system, an interactive facial muscle animation system, automatic lip-sync based on speech recognition and realistic dynamic, real-time skin shaders. The study of presence in virtual environments will be taken to a next level given the possibility of, for the first time, using affordable, realistic virtual humans. More precisely, the goals are to deploy and evaluate full range of facial expressions and to carry out cognitive and psychophysical evaluation of presence. These objectives span a wide range of knowledge areas (animation, render, human computer interaction, neuroscience…). GOLEM is built around a solid structure of transfer of knowledge between the partners, including secondments, networking activities, workshops and seminars.