Papers

The virtual world of Second LifeTM does not offer support for complex facial animations, such as those needed for an intelligent virtual agent to lip sync to audio clips. However, it is possible to access a limited range of default facial animations through the native scripting language, LSL. Our solution to produce lip sync in this environment is to rapidly trigger and stop these default animations in custom sequences to produce the illusion that the... Read more

Memory is a vital capability for intelligent social Companions. In this paper, we introduce a simple memory model that allows a Companion to maintain a long-term relationship with the user by remembering past experiences in order to personalise interaction. Additionally, we implemented a situational forgetting mechanism that gives the Companion the ability to protect the user's privacy by not disclosing sensitive data. Two test scenarios are used to demonstrate these abilities in our Companions. Read more

Our aim is to implement a motion capture database for the synthesis of virtual agents signing in French Sign Language (LSF), taking into account the semantic information implicitly contained in language data. The Gérard system is a first iteration along the path toward efficient and convincing animations of an LSF signer. Read more

Web-based tests are an established method for the evaluation (e.g. [1]). However, the validity of web-experiments has not yet been evaluated for the field of embodied conversation agents (ECAs). In this paper, evaluation results obtained in a non-interactive scenario in our lab [2] are compared to a similar web-based experiment. 3 different talking head components and 2 freely available speech synthesis systems (TTS) are combined. The head components used are the thinking head (TH), Massy... Read more

This study investigated whether emotional expressions of an ECA influence the participants´ nonverbal and verbal behavior. 70 participants took part in a small talk (10 min.) situation with the ECA MAX who was presented with two different types of feedback: emotional feedback (EMO), which provided a feedback about the emotional state of MAX (including smiles and compliments) and envelope feedback (ENV), which provided a feedback about the comprehension of the participants´ contributions. In general we... Read more

Business strategy educators increasingly rely on simulation games to provide students with experience in strategic decision making. Business games however often limit interaction to operational decision making so discovering the value of alternative strategies in different situations may take a lot of time. Furthermore, to ensure students can grasp the system complexity at this operational level, game scenarios remain relatively simple. We hypothesize that business game effectiveness for strategy education can increase if players instead... Read more

Game agents(NPCs) should have the ability to react in cooperate, and have the ability to learn from mistakes and build up their own experience. In this paper, we describe a general approach for transfer learning and adaptive mechanism for game agents' real-time planning and learning system in which agents modify their behavior in response to changes of the PCs. Read more

This paper describes the design and training of an agent that helps users navigate in Second Life (SL), a massively multi-player online game environment.SL allows users to create a virtual avatar and explore areas constructed by other users.With the increasing number of places to visit it is difficult for a user to explore all the places.The built-in keyword search mechanism is fairly limited and users typically find new places through personal exploration or tips from... Read more

This poster reports the results of two experiments to test a personality framework for virtual characters. We use the Tactical Questioning dialogue system architecture (TACQ) [1] as a testbed for this effort. Characters built using the TACQ architecture can be used by trainees to practice their questioning skills by engaging in a role-play with a virtual human. The architecture supports advanced behavior in a questioning setting, including deceptive behavior, simple negotiations about whether to answer,... Read more

This paper describes the ORACLE, an embodied intelligent virtual agent designed and built for helping players of a serious game named ORIENT [1]. The game challenges players at the socio-cultural level, because it requires them to learn how to interact smoothly with alien characters in order to save their planet. The ORACLE is a virtual agent on a mobile phone, whose goal is to enhance the users' learning in the game. The agent can both... Read more