Papers about Agent's Expression

In this article we show how socio-psychological status theories can be formalized and used to control the expressive and communicative behavior of intelligent virtual agents. We describe Exstasis, a model that computes the status and action tendencies for all actors in a situation based on their status characteristics and behavior patterns. As a configurable software component Exstasis can be integrated in existing systems to extend the social capabilities of the virtual characters. Read more

Users expect characters in role-playing games to be proactive and social, but these characters fail to deliver in this respect due to limitations of traditional game AI programming approaches. BDI-based approaches are suited for development of proactive systems, such as NPCs in games. This paper argues that a BDI-based approach is also highly suited for developing social NPCs in a principled way. Read more

We present ongoing work on CREACTOR, a research oriented authoring system for virtual actors. CREACTOR will provide a framework for experimenting with different authoring processes and AI-technologies. The main goal is the creation of virtual actors that can be employed for the development of 3D movies, following the analogy of a real director who can issue a variety of commands to real actors. Here, we present a concept called AI-tweening: employing AI to create in-between... Read more

In conjunction with Anvil and suitable annotation schemes, GAnTooL (A Gesture Annotation And Modeling Tool for Anvil) is a tool to annotate human nonverbal behavior like gestures and poses efficiently with the help of a skeleton. Using intuitive controls the user can quickly mirror the observed speaker's poses. The results can be used to build gesture descriptions and whole lexicons that transfer human behavior to interactive embodied agents. These agents can then be animated realtime... Read more

Evolving beyond their origins as a novel pastime, videogames have developed into a medium with tremendous power to entertain and engage players through emotionally powerful interaction. These emotional connections are often powered by the quality of the digital actors that inhabit game worlds and bring them to life. But as technologies for creating lifelike characters escalate, so do the challenges of the creation process. This discussion examines methods used by cutting-edge games to create deeply... Read more

By using parameterization techniques which model artistic, living or cognitive systems it is becoming possible to create new types of behavior and expression character systems. These techniques are allowing virtual agent creators to incorporate models of expression, emotion, behavior and even human creativity into their work. Additionally, rather than simply using realism as a goal, is it becoming possible to computationally model knowledge from other expression-based sources including artists, musicians and designers, to go beyond... Read more

Embodied Conversational Agents (also known as ECA) are animated software agents (usually very similar to the human figure) which represent the possibility of extending the aim of common conversation systems and perform non appropriate verbal behavior, such as facial expressions, looks, gestures and processing of natural language in all its levels, contributing to a better understanding of a message. Bickmore (2003) defines such agents as entities which use, in real time, speech, gestures, observation (among... Read more

This paper presents the NECA approach to the generation of dialogues between Embodied Conversational Agents (ECAs). This approach consist of the automated constructtion of an abstract script for an entire dialogue (cast in terms of dialogue acts), which is incrementally enhanced by a series of modules and finally ”performed” by means of text, speech and body language, by a cast of ECAs. The approach makes it possible to automatically produce a large variety of highly... Read more

We aim at defining conversational agents that exhibit qualitatively distinctive behaviors. To this aim we provide a small set of parameters to allow one to define behavior profiles and then leave to the system the task of animating the agent. Our approach is to manipulate the behavior tendency of the agent depending on its communicative intention and emotional state. In this paper we will define the concepts of Baseline and Dynamicline. The Baseline of an agent... Read more

Against the background that recent studies on embodied conversational agents demonstrate the importance of their behavior, an experimental study is presented that assessed the effects of different nonverbal behaviors of an embodied conversational agent on the experiences and evaluations of the user as well as on their behavior. 50 participants conducted a conversation with different versions of the virtual agent Max, whose nonverbal communication was manipulated with regard to eyebrow movements and self-touching gestures. In... Read more