Papers about Role playing

Actor agents in a virtual reality and interactive drama must deliver a believable performance. This is challenging and many issues need to be resolved. One prominent problem is that the goals of a character in an emergent interactive drama may conflict with demands for coherency in the drama's progress. We propose an approach to resolve this that uses Object Oriented Bayesian networks and intelligent agents with dual roles: an actor role focused on the dramatic... Read more

In realistic looking game environments it is important that virtual characters behave naturally. Our goal is to produce naturally looking gaze behavior for animated agents and avatars that are simply idling. We studied people standing and waiting, as well as people walking down a shopping street. From our observations we built a demo with the CADIA Populus multi-agent social simulation platform. Read more

Virtual training systems provide an effective means to train people for complex, dynamic tasks such as crisis management or firefighting. Intelligent agents are often used to play the characters with whom a trainee interacts. To increase the trainee's understanding of played scenarios, several accounts of agents that can explain the reasons for their actions have been proposed. This paper describes an empirical study of what instructors consider useful agent explanations for trainees. It was found... Read more

Interactive Virtual Standardized Patients (VP) can provide meaningful training for clinicians. These VP's portray interactive embodied conversational characters with realistic representations of a mental or physical problem to be diagnosed or discussed. This research is a continuation of evaluating of our VP "Justina" [2] which suffers from Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) from a sexual attack and presents the results of comparing novices, test subjects without medical training, and experts interacting with 'Justina' to find out... Read more

The JISC-funded PREVIEW project aims to develop problem-based learning (PBL) scenarios in Second Life (SL) for distance-learning healthcare students. One of the target courses - a Paramedic course run by the joint faculty of St George’s University of London and Kingston University – uses PBL that is based upon a ‘virtual patient’ model. In order to keep scenarios as sustainable and portable as possible we adopted the MedBiquitous VP Standard – or MVP - designed for... Read more

An experimental approach was used to compare two types of web interfaces (text-based vs. conversation-based) to content on the life and theories of Jean Piaget. The content in each interface was identical with the exception of third- vs. first-person references. Fifty-nine students in psychology first completed a pretest of Piagetian knowledge and then were randomly assigned to one of the two interfaces. After 20 minutes of review/conversation, students completed a 35-item exam designed to measure... Read more

There is an extensive body of work on ntelligent Tutoring Systems: computer environments for education, teaching and training that adapt to the needs of the individual learner. Work on personalisation and adaptivity has included research into allowing the student user to enhance the system’s adaptivity by improving the accuracy of the underlying learner model. Open Learner Modelling, where the system’s model of the user’s knowledge is revealed to the user, has been proposed to support student reflection... Read more

"Narrative" is one of key words in the modern society. Giddens pointed out a central role of narratives of the self in some literatures on self-actualization in the late modern society. Kobayashi claimed that there are increasing people trying to write life histories of themselves, and industries aiming at satisfying demand of these people like manuals for making narratives of selves, publishers, and so on, called "narrative industries", have appeared. There is a possibility that... Read more

This research investigates the meaning of ‘human-computer relationship’ and presents techniques for constructing, maintaining, and evaluating such relationships, based on research in social psychology, sociolinguistics, communication and other social sciences. Contexts in which relationships are particularly important are described, together with specific benefits (like trust) and task outcomes (like improved learning) known to be associated with relationship quality. We especially consider the problem of designing for longterm interaction, and define relational agents as computational... Read more

Pedagogical theory of today gives high priority to social components of learning. Within the field of computer supported learning there are many attempts to acknowledge this. One approach involves the addition of virtual characters to electronic learning environments. Such character enhanced systems are the focus of the present article. Firstly, a systematic overview is given of pedagogical benefits that have been proposed in the literature regarding character enhancement of electronic learning environments, for example... Read more