Designing and Implementing Embodied Agents: Learning from Experience

In this paper, we provide an overview of part of our experience in designing and implementing some of the embodied agents and talking faces that we have used for our research into human computer interaction. We focus on the techniques that were used and evaluate this with respect to the purpose that the agents and faces were to serve and the costs involved in producing and maintaining the software. We discuss the function of this research and development in relation to the educational programme of our graduate students

Towards virtual communities on the Web: Actors and audience

We report about ongoing research in a virtual reality environment where visitors can interact with agents that help them to obtain information, to perform certain transactions and to collaborate with them in order to get some tasks done. Our environment models a theatre in our hometown. We discuss attempts to let this environment evolve into a theatre community where we do not only have goal-directed visitors, but also visitors that that are not sure whether they want to buy or just want information or visitors who just want to look around. It is shown that we need a multi-user and multiagent environment to realize our goals. Since our environment models a theatre it is also interesting to investigate the roles of performers and audience in this environment. For that reason we discuss capabilities and personalities of agents. Some notes on the historical development of networked communities are included

Maps, agents and dialogue for exploring a virtual world

In previous years we have been involved in several projects in which users (or visitors) had to find their way in information-rich virtual environments. 'Information-rich' means that the users do not know beforehand what is available in the environment, where to go in the environment to find the information and, moreover, users or visitors do not necessarily know exactly what they are looking for. Information-rich means also that the information may change during time. A second visit to the same environment will require different behavior of the visitor in order for him or her to obtain similar information than was available during a previous visit. In this paper we report about two projects and discuss our attempts to generalize from the different approaches and application domains to obtain a library of methods and tools to design and implement intelligent agents that inhabit virtual environments and where the agents support the navigation of the user/visitor

An animated metaphor for agent oriented programming

The term Animated Systems has been introduced in the bibliography in reference to interactive dynarnic worlds simulations, composed of interacting independent objects [Tra96]. Simulation is a powerful tool because it allows the construction of virtual worlds that model a part of the real world. The laws of physics, the animal behavior patterns, are no longer abstract theories, and they transform into tangible realities. Through the creation, the observation and the modification of the virtual world it is possible to obtain an enhanced comprehension of the world that is being modeled. The most flexible way to create a simulation is by programming it [Cyp95]. The environments and languages of conventional programming allow the development of virtual worlds, but they are not adequate for this task. The conception of a program as a sequence of instructions, on what the procedural model is based, requires a considerable capacity for mental contortion. Even object oriented prograrnming, based on message passing, demands a strong level of abstraction. In particular, they are too complex for novice users. We cannot eliminate the inherent complexity of the problem of building a virtual world, but we can search for tools that are expressive enough so the task is not complicated any further. So, the construction of dynamic worlds requires paradigms, environments and prograrnming languages that provide a new way of thinking about programs [Cyp94]. This article proposes agent based prograrnming as a metaphor for building worlds of interactive autonomous objects. This alternative is attractive because it is natural to build animated systems on the base of a metaphor that takes elements of live agents of the real world to build a virtual world.Eje: Aspectos teóricos de la inteligencia artificialRed de Universidades con Carreras en Informática (RedUNCI

Introduction: The Third International Conference on Epigenetic Robotics

This paper summarizes the paper and poster contributions to the Third International Workshop on Epigenetic Robotics. The focus of this workshop is on the cross-disciplinary interaction of developmental psychology and robotics. Namely, the general goal in this area is to create robotic models of the psychological development of various behaviors. The term "epigenetic" is used in much the same sense as the term "developmental" and while we could call our topic "developmental robotics", developmental robotics can be seen as having a broader interdisciplinary emphasis. Our focus in this workshop is on the interaction of developmental psychology and robotics and we use the phrase "epigenetic robotics" to capture this focus

Reference Resolution in Multi-modal Interaction: Position paper

In this position paper we present our research on multimodal interaction in and with virtual environments. The aim of this presentation is to emphasize the necessity to spend more research on reference resolution in multimodal contexts. In multi-modal interaction the human conversational partner can apply more than one modality in conveying his or her message to the environment in which a computer detects and interprets signals from different modalities. We show some naturally arising problems and how they are treated for different contexts. No generally applicable solutions are given

Understanding virtual actors

Publicado em: "2010 Brazilian Symposium on Games and Digital Entertainment: SBGames 2010 : proceedings". ISBN 978-0-7695-4359-8Autonomous Digital Actors represent the next step in authoring movies with believable characters, in a way that will allow them to be trained for acting specific roles in a story, suggesting appropriate behaviors during their performance. This article presents an overview of the art of acting and directing and how these concepts were used to elaborate a Virtual Actor metaphor. Also, we present an agent architecture for describing and implementing the virtual actors’ acting knowledge base.(undefined

On the simulation of interactive non-verbal behaviour in virtual humans

Development of virtual humans has focused mainly in two broad areas - conversational agents and computer game characters. Computer game characters have traditionally been action-oriented - focused on the game-play - and conversational agents have been focused on sensible/intelligent conversation. While virtual humans have incorporated some form of non-verbal behaviour, this has been quite limited and more importantly not connected or connected very loosely with the behaviour of a real human interacting with the virtual human - due to a lack of sensor data and no system to respond to that data. The interactional aspect of non-verbal behaviour is highly important in human-human interactions and previous research has demonstrated that people treat media (and therefore virtual humans) as real people, and so interactive non-verbal behaviour is also important in the development of virtual humans. This paper presents the challenges in creating virtual humans that are non-verbally interactive and drawing corollaries with the development history of control systems in robotics presents some approaches to solving these challenges - specifically using behaviour based systems - and shows how an order of magnitude increase in response time of virtual humans in conversation can be obtained and that the development of rapidly responding non-verbal behaviours can start with just a few behaviours with more behaviours added without difficulty later in development