Papers about Body motion

There are currently no evaluation methods specific to ECAs in CVEs and traditional evaluation methods are limited in their applicability and consequently unlikely to address the full range of aspects now inherent in such systems. We argue that a combination of controlled experimentation, quasi-experiments, review-based evaluation and heuristic expert reviews is needed. To operationalise these traditional evaluation methods the concept of presence was deployed, and it was argued that presence as a cognitive variable can... Read more

We discuss how simulating emotional dialogs with an Embodied Agent requires endowing it with ability to manifest appropriately emotions but also to exploit them in controlling behavior. We then describe a domain-independent testbed to simulate dialogs in affective domains and verify how they change when the context in which interaction occurs is varied. Emotion activation is simulated by dynamic belief networks while dialog simulation is implemented within a logical framework. Read more

Among the goals of research on autonomous agents one important aim is to build Believable Interactive Embodied Agents that are apt to be applied to friendly interfaces in e-commerce, tourist and service query systems, entertainment (e.g. synthetic actors) and education (pedagogical agents, agents for help and instruction to the hearing impaired). A believable agent is one able to show (even, may be, to feel?) emotions and one who has a definite personality. An interactive agent... Read more

This is a research of graphical multi-user communication environments. I have studied the interactive behavior of and between humans and chatterbots. First I will describe the emotional and behavioral impacts that a chatterbot can provoke in users as individuals and as members of a group. Sometimes it is not self-evident to recognize who in a chat room is a bot and who is human. This is due to the limits and possibilities of digital interface,... Read more

Lifelike characters, or animated agents, provide a promising option for interface development because they allow us to draw on communication and interaction styles with which humans are already familiar. In this contribution, we revisit some of our past and ongoing projects to motivate an evolution of character-based presentation systems. This evolution starts from systems in which a character presents information content in the style of a TV presenter. It moves on with the introduction of presentation... Read more

How do we decide how to represent an intelligent system in its interface, and how do we decide how the interface represents information about the world and about its own workings to a user? This article addresses these questions by examining the interaction between representation and intelligence in user interfaces. The rubric “representation” covers at least three topics in this context: how a computational system is represented in its user interface, how the interface conveys its representations... Read more

Synthesis of lifelike gesture is finding growing attention in human-computer interaction. In particular, synchronization of synthetic gestures with speech output is one of the goals for embodied conversational agents which have become a new paradigm for the study of gesture and for human-computer interface. In this context, this contribution presents an operational model that enables lifelike gesture animations of an articulated figure to be rendered in real time from representations of spatiotemporal gesture knowledge. Based... Read more

Reearch into virtual environments on the one hand and artificial intelligence and artificial life on the other has largely been carried out by two different groups of people with different preoccupations and interests, but some convergence is now apparent between the two fields. Applications in which activity independent of the user takes place — involving crowds or other agents — are beginning to be tackled, while synthetic agents, virtual humans and computer pets are all areas... Read more

To explore the use of animated agents for task-oriented collaboration in virtual worlds, we have designed such an agent: Steve (Soar Training Expert for Virtual Environments). Steve is fully implemented and integrated with the other software components on which he relies (i.e., visual interface software, a simulator, and commercial speech synthesis and recognition products). We have tested Steve on a variety of naval operating procedures; he can teach students how to operate and maintain the... Read more

In this paper, we argue for embodied conversational characters as the logical extension of the metaphor of human – computer interaction as a conversation. We argue that the only way to fully model the richness of human face-to-face communication is to rely on conversational analysis that describes sets of conversational behaviors as fulfilling conversational functions, both interactional and propositional. We demonstrate how to implement this approach in Rea, an embodied conversational agent that is capable... Read more