On combining the facial movements of a talking head

We present work on Obie, an embodied conversational agent framework. An embodied conversational agent, or talking head, consists of three main components. The graphical part consists of a face model and a facial muscle model. Besides the graphical part, we have implemented an emotion model and a mapping from emotions to facial expressions. The animation part of the framework focuses on the combination of different facial movements temporally. In this paper we propose a scheme of combining facial movements on a 3D talking head

Affective interactions between expressive characters

When people meet in virtual worlds they are represented by computer animated characters that lack a variety of expression and can seem stiff and robotic. By comparison human bodies are highly expressive; a casual observation of a group of people mil reveals a large diversity of behavior, different postures, gestures and complex patterns of eye gaze. In order to make computer mediated communication between people more like real face-to-face communication, it is necessary to add an affective dimension. This paper presents Demeanour, an affective semi-autonomous system for the generation of realistic body language in avatars. Users control their avatars that in turn interact autonomously with other avatars to produce expressive behaviour. This allows people to have affectively rich interactions via their avatars

Direct Manipulation-like Tools for Designing Intelligent Virtual Agents

If intelligent virtual agents are to become widely adopted it is vital that they can be designed using the user friendly graphical tools that are used in other areas of graphics. However, extending this sort of tool to autonomous, interactive behaviour, an area with more in common with artificial intelligence, is not trivial. This paper discusses the issues involved in creating user-friendly design tools for IVAs and proposes an extension of the direct manipulation methodology to IVAs. It also presents an initial implementation of this methodology

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

Online backchannel synthesis evaluation with the switching Wizard of Oz

In this paper, we evaluate a backchannel synthesis algorithm in an online conversation between a human speaker and a virtual listener. We adopt the Switching Wizard of Oz (SWOZ) approach to assess behavior synthesis algorithms online. A human speaker watches a virtual listener that is either controlled by a human listener or by an algorithm. The source switches at random intervals. Speakers indicate when they feel they are no longer talking to a human listener. Analysis of these responses reveals patterns of inappropriate behavior in terms of quantity and timing of backchannels