Papers about Agent's Expression

Embodied social agents are programmed to display human-like social behaviour to increase intuitiveness of interacting with these agents. It is not yet clear to what extent people respond to agents’ social behaviours. One example is touch. Despite robots’ embodiment and increasing autonomy, the effect of communicative touch has been a mostly overlooked aspect of human-robot interaction. This video-based, 2x2 between subject survey experiment (N=119) found that the combination of touch and proactivity influenced whether people... Read more

This paper aims to present e the work developed at Cnotinfor within the LIREC project. We will present Little Mozart mind architecture and facial expressions. Our goal is to create a virtual e-learning agent capable of establishing meaningful interactions with children on how to compose and improve their knowledge of melodic composition and basics of musical language. In order to make our agent believable and engaging we resorted to facial and body 3D modeling techniques... Read more

This paper provides a method to make locomotion animation using riding motion, which is synthesized by computer simulation. Our locomotion system uses riding motion to avoid collision between objects instead of traditional obstacle avoidance. The two-dimensional locomotion using obstacle avoidance has a problem in that positions that the agent move is limited if the number of agents is large. In game or film, user or artist should throw up natural movement to locate agents in... Read more

In this paper we present RealActor, a character behavior realization system for embodied conversational agents based on the Behavior Markup Language (BML). Developed several years ago as part of the SAIBA framework, BML is an XML dialect for describing physical realizations of multimodal human behaviors. It allows modeling of complex communicative utterances which include both verbal and non-verbal behavior. BML elements represent various primitive actions (e.g. speech, facial and body gestures) and multimodal behavior can... Read more

In this paper, we present our current study on the design of a virtual agent able to express sentences in Sign Language (SL), so-called 'Virtual Signer', in the context of interactive web-based applications. Up now, little work has been carried out on web-based virtual signers. As for current research on virtual signers in standalone applications, it relies on two main approaches: Pre-synthesized animations based on motion capture or rotoscoping, and generated animations, with very little interactivity.... Read more

We look at how some basic choices in the management of turns influence the impression that people get from an agent. We look at scales concerning personality, emotion and interpersonal stance. We do this by a person perception study, or rather an agent perception study, using simulated conversations that systematically vary basic turn-taking strategies. We show how we can create different impressions of friendliness, rudeness, arousal and several other dimensions by varying the timing of... 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

Over the past decade, motion capture data has become a popular research tool, and motion databases have grown exponentially. Indexing, querying, and retrieving data has thus become more difficult, and has necessitated innovative approaches to using these databases. Our aim is to make this approach feasible for virtual agents signing in French Sign Language (LSF), taking into account the semantic information implicitly contained in language data. We thus structure a database in two autonomous units,... Read more

Effective speakers engage their whole body when they gesture. It is difficult, however, to create such full body motion in animated agents while still supporting a large and flexible gesture set. This paper presents a hybrid system that combines motion capture data with a procedural animation system for arm gestures. Procedural approaches are well suited to supporting a large and easily modified set of gestures, but are less adept at producing subtle, full body movement.... 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. In this paper, we present EMBR, a new realtime character animation engine that offers a high degree of animation control via the EMBRScript language. We argue that a new layer of... Read more