Papers about Gestures

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

Virtual Humans are artificial characters who look and act like humans, but inhabit a simulated environment. One important aspect of many virtual humans is their communicative dialogue ability. In this paper we outline a methodology for study of dialogue behavior and construction of virtual humans. We also consider three architectures for different types of virtual humans that have been built at the Institute for Creative Technologies. 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

What is the hallmark of success in human-agent interaction? In animation and robotics, many have concentrated in the looks of the agent - whether the appearance is realistic of lifelike. We present an alternative benchmark that lies in the dyad and not the agent alone: Does the agent's behavior evoke intersubjectivity from the user? That is, in both conscious and unconscious communication, do users react to behaviorally realistic agents in the same way they react... Read more

In face-to-face dialogue, the participants have visible as well as audible resources for social communication, that is, not just words and prosody, but also hand gestures, facial displays, gaze direction and timing, body orientation, and objects in their shared environment. We propose that some non-verbal acts play an important role in the participants' collaboration, so that the study ofthese non-verbal acts in dialogue is a promising way to understand basic processes in social communication. 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