Papers about Agent's Expression

In this report a number of research projects are summarized that aimed at investigating the emotional effects of android robots. In particular, those robots are focused on that have been developed and are incessantly being improved by Hiroshi Ishiguro at both the Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute International (ATR) in Kyoto and Osaka University in Osaka, Japan. Parts of the reported empirical research have been conducted by the author himself during a two-year research stay at ATR as post-doctoral... Read more

Virtual humans are employed in many interactive applications using 3D virtual environments, including (serious) games. The motion of such virtual humans should look realistic (or ‘natural’) and allow interaction with the surroundings and other (virtual) humans. Current animation techniques differ in the trade-off they offer between motion naturalness and the control that can be exerted over the motion. We show mechanisms to parametrize, combine (on different body parts) and concatenate motions generated by different animation... Read more

Conversational agents that display many human qualities have become a valuable method business uses to communicate with online users to supply services or products, to help in online order process or to search the Web. The gaming industry and education may benefit from this type of interface. In this type of chats, users could have different alternatives: text display, photo of a real person, or a cartoon drawing and others. This is an exploratory study... Read more

Paper "The Persona Zero-Effect: Evaluating virtual character benefits on a learning task with repeated interactions" presents embodied agents, that have the potential to become a highly natural human-computer interaction device - they are already is use as tutors, presenters and assistants. However, it remains an open question whether adding an agent to an application has a measurable impact, positive or negative, in terms of motivation and learning performance. Prior studies are very diverse with respect... Read more

Embodied agents are a powerful paradigm for current and future multimodal interfaces yet require high effort and expertise for their creation, assembly, and animation control. Therefore, open animation engines and high-level control languages are required to make embodied agents accessible to researchers and developers. We present EMBR, a new real-time character animation engine that offers a high degree of animation control via the EMBRScript language. We argue that a new layer of control, the animation... Read more

For centuries artists have been exploring color to express emotions. Following this insight, the paper describes an approach to learn how to use color to influence the perception of emotions in virtual humans. First, a model of lighting and filters inspired on the visual arts is integrated with a virtual human platform to manipulate color. Next, an evolutionary model, based on genetic algorithms, is created to evolve mappings between emotions and lighting and filter parameters.... Read more

Facial animation is referred to all those systems performing the speech synchronization with an animated face model. This kind of systems are called "Talking Head" or "Talking Face". In this paper a Talking Head oriented to the creation of a Chatbot is presented. It requires an input query and an answer is generated in form of text. The answer is transduced into a facial animation using a 3D face model whose lips movements are... Read more

Basilica is an event-driven software architecture for creating conversational agents as a collection of reusable components. Software engineers and computer scientists can use this general architecture to create increasingly sophisticated conversational agents. We have developed agents based on Basilica that have been used in various application scenarios and foresee that agents build on Basilica can cater to a wider variety of interactive situations as we continue to add functionality to our architecture. Read more

Currently, applications that focus on providing conversations with virtual humans require extensive work to create robust conversational models. We present a new approach called Human-centered Distributed Conversational Modeling. Using this approach, users create conversational models in a distributed manner. To do this, end-users interact with virtual humans to provide new stimuli (questions and statements), and domain-specific experts (e.g. medical/psychology educators) provide new virtual human responses. Using this process, users become the primary developers... Read more

We describe the design and evaluation of an agent that uses the fillers um and uh in its speech. We describe an empirical study of human-human dialogue, analyzing gaze behavior during the production of fillers and use this data to develop a model of agent-based gaze behavior. We find that speakers are significantly more likely to gaze away from their dialogue partner while uttering fillers, especially if the filler occurs at the beginning of a... Read more