Papers about Body posture

This paper proposes two simple and robust algorithmic solutions for two frequently encountered problems in in-habited virtual heritage worlds: a) the 'still-frozen' behavior of virtual actors once their predefined-scripted anima-tion is executed and b) their real-time rendering which is mostly often based on non physically-principled local il-lumination models. Our described framework thus provides a) a procedural keyframe generator for realistic idle motions blended with the virtual actor's scripted behavior and b) an extension to precomputed... Read more

This paper presents the mechanisms proposed by a generic cognitive architecture for virtual characters with emotional influenced behaviors, called cognitiva, to maintain behavior control at will without giving up the richness provided by emotions. This architecture, together with a progressive specification process for its application, have been used successfully to model 3D intelligent virtual actors for virtual storytelling. Read more

Individuality of Embodied Conversational Agents (ECAs) may depend on both the look of the agent and the way it combines different modalities such as speech and gesture. In this chapter, we describe a study in which male and female users had to listen to three short technical presentations made by ECAs. Three multimodal strategies of ECAs for using arm gestures with speech were compared: redundancy, complementarity, and speech-specialization. These strategies were randomly attributed to different-looking... Read more

We discuss how simulating emotional dialogs with an Embodied Agent requires endowing it with ability to manifest appropriately emotions but also to exploit them in controlling behavior. We then describe a domain-independent testbed to simulate dialogs in affective domains and verify how they change when the context in which interaction occurs is varied. Emotion activation is simulated by dynamic belief networks while dialog simulation is implemented within a logical framework. Read more

Among the goals of research on autonomous agents one important aim is to build Believable Interactive Embodied Agents that are apt to be applied to friendly interfaces in e-commerce, tourist and service query systems, entertainment (e.g. synthetic actors) and education (pedagogical agents, agents for help and instruction to the hearing impaired). A believable agent is one able to show (even, may be, to feel?) emotions and one who has a definite personality. An interactive agent... Read more

Research on embodied conversational agent interfaces has produced widely divergent results. We suggest that this is due to insufficient consideration of key factors that influence the perception and effectiveness of agent-based interfaces. Thus, we propose a framework for the evaluation of conversational agent interfaces that can systematize the research. The framework emphasizes features of the agent, characteristics of the user, and the task the user is performing. We have conducted experiments within this framework. The first study manipulated the agent's... Read more

This is a research of graphical multi-user communication environments. I have studied the interactive behavior of and between humans and chatterbots. First I will describe the emotional and behavioral impacts that a chatterbot can provoke in users as individuals and as members of a group. Sometimes it is not self-evident to recognize who in a chat room is a bot and who is human. This is due to the limits and possibilities of digital interface,... Read more

Lifelike characters, or animated agents, provide a promising option for interface development because they allow us to draw on communication and interaction styles with which humans are already familiar. In this contribution, we revisit some of our past and ongoing projects to motivate an evolution of character-based presentation systems. This evolution starts from systems in which a character presents information content in the style of a TV presenter. It moves on with the introduction of presentation... Read more

Synthesis of lifelike gesture is finding growing attention in human-computer interaction. In particular, synchronization of synthetic gestures with speech output is one of the goals for embodied conversational agents which have become a new paradigm for the study of gesture and for human-computer interface. In this context, this contribution presents an operational model that enables lifelike gesture animations of an articulated figure to be rendered in real time from representations of spatiotemporal gesture knowledge. Based... Read more

To explore the use of animated agents for task-oriented collaboration in virtual worlds, we have designed such an agent: Steve (Soar Training Expert for Virtual Environments). Steve is fully implemented and integrated with the other software components on which he relies (i.e., visual interface software, a simulator, and commercial speech synthesis and recognition products). We have tested Steve on a variety of naval operating procedures; he can teach students how to operate and maintain the... Read more