Authoring Multi-Actor Behaviors in Crowds With Diverse Personalities

Multi-actor simulation is critical to cinematic content creation, disaster and security simulation, and interactive entertainment. A key challenge is providing an appropriate interface for authoring high-fidelity virtual actors with featurerich control mechanisms capable of complex interactions with the environment and other actors. In this chapter, we present work that addresses the problem of behavior authoring at three levels: Individual and group interactions are conducted in an event-centric manner using parameterized behavior trees, social crowd dynamics are captured using the OCEAN personality model, and a centralized automated planner is used to enforce global narrative constraints on the scale of the entire simulation. We demonstrate the benefits and limitations of each of these approaches and propose the need for a single unifying construct capable of authoring functional, purposeful, autonomous actors which conform to a global narrative in an interactive simulation

Real-Time Storytelling with Events in Virtual Worlds

We present an accessible interactive narrative tool for creating stories among a virtual populace inhabiting a fully-realized 3D virtual world. Our system supports two modalities: assisted authoring where a human storyteller designs stories using a storyboard-like interface called CANVAS, and exploratory authoring where a human author experiences a story as it happens in real-time and makes on-the-fly narrative trajectory changes using a tool called Storycraft. In both cases, our system analyzes the semantic content of the world and the narrative being composed, and provides automated assistance such as completing partially-specified stories with causally complete sequences of intermediate actions. At its core, our system revolves around events -â?? pre-authored multi-actor task sequences describing interactions between groups of actors and props. These events integrate complex animation and interaction tasks with precision control and expose them as atoms of narrative significance to the story direction systems. Events are an accessible tool and conceptual metaphor for assembling narrative arcs, providing a tightly-coupled solution to the problem of converting author intent to real-time animation synthesis. Our system allows simple and straightforward macro- and microscopic control over large numbers of virtual characters with diverse and sophisticated behavior capabilities, and reduces the complicated action space of an interactive narrative by providing analysis and user assistance in the form of semi-automation and recommendation services

Agents for educational games and simulations

This book consists mainly of revised papers that were presented at the Agents for Educational Games and Simulation (AEGS) workshop held on May 2, 2011, as part of the Autonomous Agents and MultiAgent Systems (AAMAS) conference in Taipei, Taiwan. The 12 full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from various submissions. The papers are organized topical sections on middleware applications, dialogues and learning, adaption and convergence, and agent applications

Virtual Reality Games for Motor Rehabilitation

This paper presents a fuzzy logic based method to track user satisfaction without the need for devices to monitor users physiological conditions. User satisfaction is the key to any product’s acceptance; computer applications and video games provide a unique opportunity to provide a tailored environment for each user to better suit their needs. We have implemented a non-adaptive fuzzy logic model of emotion, based on the emotional component of the Fuzzy Logic Adaptive Model of Emotion (FLAME) proposed by El-Nasr, to estimate player emotion in UnrealTournament 2004. In this paper we describe the implementation of this system and present the results of one of several play tests. Our research contradicts the current literature that suggests physiological measurements are needed. We show that it is possible to use a software only method to estimate user emotion

Authoring Authority: The Apostle Paul and the Prophet Joseph Smith--A Critical Comparison of Texts and Power in the Generation of Religious Community

. . . believe in God, believe also in me . . . --John 14.1 Authoring Authority analyzes the ways texts function to generate social cohesion while at the same time advancing the power interests of their authors. The study is a comparative, critical, and interdisciplinary/transdisciplinary excavation of the religion-making efforts of the first-century Christian Apostle Paul and the nineteenth-century Mormon Prophet Joseph Smith. This comparison defamiliarizes and recharacterizes the heroes and origin-stories of the dominant (and my own) tradition to force important questions about scholarly perspectives, interests and deferences (protection, exceptionalization), self-reflexivity, and politics. The project\u27s critical orientation deploys insights and models from a range of disciplines to read these texts, not for exegetical purposes, but for what they signify and how they function in nascent social formations. The texts of these men were presented as if their contents were other than the products of embedded social actors (e.g. it really is God\u27s word 1 Thes 2.13) contending for limited resources such as discursive authority and social power. These charismatic narrators harnessed the authority of pre-existing texts and traditions and integrated them with contemporary perspectives and sentiment. Their texts and performances offered a contingent construal of reality as ultimate reality--which served the power needs of their authors and the existential needs of their communities of subscribers. The dissertation begins with the articulation of an analytical framework appropriate for the critical and comparative academic study of religion. Chapter two contextualizes the lives of these men within cultural settings that provided motivation, made available vocational training and, ultimately provisioned social opportunities for them as adept charismatics. Chapter three directly illuminates the range of techniques embedded in texts, both implicit and explicit, of claiming power and developing a following. The final chapter wrestles with the functional role of deception in social formation and human life

What We Know About Wikipedia: A Review of the Literature Analyzing the Project(s).

This article proposes a review of the literature analyzing Wikipedia as a collective system for producing knowledge. JEL Classification: L39, L86, H41, D7