Papers

Multimodal user interfaces are becoming more and more important in human-machine communication. Essential representatives of such interfaces are virtual agents that aim to act like humans in the way they employ gestures, facial expression, posture and prosody to convey their emotions in face-to-face communication. Furthermore, if we employ a presentation team [1] to convey facts, the performance becomes more entertaining for the audience. Distinct characters should have different roles and personality profiles. Moreover if we... 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

The multi-modal rock-paper-scissors game is an interactive computer game where the opponent of the human player is a virtual agent appearing on the computer screen. The game is similar to the game between humans, the communication takes place by the tools of image and sound processing. 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

We discuss the ethical and practical issues involved in developing virtual humans that relate personal, fictitious, human autobiographical stories ("back stories") to their users. We describe a virtual human exercise counselor that interacts with users daily to promote exercise, and the integration of a dynamic social storytelling engine used to maintain user engagement with the agent and retention in the intervention. A longitudinal randomized controlled experiment tested user attitudes towards the agent when it presented... 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

When humans interact with one another, socially intelligent conversational behaviors arise from the interaction of a number of different factors: the conversants' personality, cultural knowledge, the ability to observe and reason about social relationships, and the ability to project and detect affective cues. For virtual agents to be socially intelligent, they must have an expressive conversational repertoire. Moreover, scientific progress in this area requires that these expressive capabilities be easily parameterized, to support experimentation, and... 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

In this paper we describe a way to access information using chatbot, without the need for sophisticated natural language processing or logical inference. FAQs are Frequently-Asked Questions documents, designed to capture the logical ontology of a given domain. Any Natural Language interface to an FAQ is constrained to reply with the given Answers, so there is no need for NL generation to recreate well-formed answers, or for deep analysis or logical inference to map... Read more