Customisation and Context for Expressive Behaviour in the Broadband World

The introduction of consumer broadband makes it possible to have an emotionally much richer experience of the internet. One way of achieving this is the use of animated characters endowed with emotionally expressive behaviour. This paper describes Demeanour, a framework for generating expressive behaviour, developed collaboratively by University College London and BT plc. The focus of this paper will be on two important aspects; the customisation of expressive behaviour and how expressive behaviour can be made context dependent. Customisation is a very popular feature for internet software, particularly as it allows users to present a specific identity to other users; the ability to customise beahviour will increase this sense of identity. Demeanour supports a number of user friendly methods for customisng behaviour, all of which use a character profile that ultimately controls the behaviour of the character. What counts as appropriate behaviour is highly dependent on the context, where you are, who you are talking to, whether you have a particular job or role. It is therefore very important that characters are able to exhibit different behaviours in different contexts. Demeanour allows characters to load different profiles in different contexts and therefore produce different behaviour

A paradigm for controlling virtual humans in urban environment simulations

Presents a new architecture for simulating virtual humans in complex urban environments. The approach is based on the integration of six modules. Four key modules are used in order to manage environmental data, simulate human crowds, control interactions between virtual humans and objects, and generate tasks based on a rule-based behavioral model. The communication between these modules is made through a client/server system. Finally, all low-level virtual human actions are delegated to a single motion and behavioral control module. Our architecture combines various human and object simulation aspects, based on the coherent extraction and classification of information from a virtual city database. This architecture is discussed in this paper, together with a detailed case study exampl