Developing virtual actors inspired by real actors’ practice

Autonomous Digital Actors represent the next step in animating 3D characters. How to create such virtual actors remains an open question. This work presents and discusses an agent architecture derived from how real actors learn their art from acting schools. The knowledge base relies on a rule-based system where each rule encodes explicit knowledge into a classification vector which allows agents to suggest performances even for unforeseen situations, and to adjust their suggestions to match the animator’s preferencesFundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT

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

Creating partly autonomous expressive virtual actors for computer animation

Tese de doutoramento em Tecnologias e Sistemas de InformaçãoAutonomous digital actors represent the next stage in the animation industry in its search for novel processes for authoring character-based animations. In this research, we have conducted a literature review on the art of acting, to obtain an understanding of how apprentice actors learn their skills; this has enabled us to draw up a list of requirements for a proposed autonomous agent architecture for digital actors. The purpose of this was to suggest an improvement in the current technology on digital actors and the way \believable" characters are used by the game and animation industries. Our solution considers three main layers in terms of what skills autonomous actors should display: rst, they should be able to interpret script representations autonomously; second, there is a deliberation phase which aims at implementing an agent architecture to work out suitable ways of enacting the previously interpreted script and third, these enactments are translated into animation commands that are suitable for a given animation engine. We have outlined four versions for this virtual actors' framework, the third of which resulted in a prototype built using the Python language, for evaluation. The nal solution is a prototype that meets the list of requirements that were listed at the outset of the research. Although determining the best process for creating autonomous digital actors remains an open question, we believe that this thesis provides a better understanding of some of its components, and can lead towards the development of the rst fully functional autonomous digital actor.Atores Digitais Autónomos representam o próximo avanço para a indústria da animação, em sua busca por novos processos de autoria de animações baseadas em personagens. Nesta investigação, foi realizada uma revisão de literatura relativamente a arte da atuação cénica, afim de se obter uma melhor compreensão acerca de como atores aprendizes aprendem suas competências; isto nos permitiu produzir uma lista de requisitos para uma arquitetura para agentes autónomos que atuem como atores digitais. O objetivo disto era sugerir melhorias na tecnologia atual de atores digitais e na maneira como personagens \credíveis" são utilizados pelas indústrias de jogos e animações. Nossa solução considera três camadas principais em termos de quais habilidades os atores autónomos deveriam demonstrar: primeiramente, eles deveriam ser capazes de interpretar uma representação abstrata de um roteiro de forma autónoma; a seguir, existe uma etapa de deliberação cujo objetivo é implementar uma arquitetura de agentes para determinar maneiras adequadas de atuação para o roteiro previamente interpretado; e por ultimo, tais atuações são então traduzidas em comandos de animação reconhecíveis por uma dada ferramenta de animação. Foram desenvolvidas quatro versões para este modelo de atores virtuais, sendo que a terceira delas resultou em um protótipo construído na linguagem Python, para avaliação. A solução final é um protótipo que atende a todos os critérios previstos pela lista de requisitos inicialmente proposta por esta investigação. Apesar do fato de que encontrar as melhores práticas de construção de atores digitais autónomos permanecer como uma questão em aberto, acredita-se que esta tese fornece uma melhor compreensão sobre alguns de seus componentes, e com isso aponta caminhos em direção ao desenvolvimento do primeiro ator digital autónomo, plenamente funcional.Santa Catarina State University (UDESC)Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT)Centro de Computação Gráfica (CCG

Trust Management in the Internet of Everything

Digitalization is leading us towards a future where people, processes, data and things are not only interacting with each other, but might start forming societies on their own. In these dynamic systems enhanced by artificial intelligence, trust management on the level of human-to-machine as well as machine-to-machine interaction becomes an essential ingredient in supervising safe and secure progress of our digitalized future. This tutorial paper discusses the essential elements of trust management in complex digital ecosystems, guiding the reader through the definitions and core concepts of trust management. Furthermore, it explains how trust-building can be leveraged to support people in safe interaction with other (possibly autonomous) digital agents, as trust governance may allow the ecosystem to trigger an auto-immune response towards untrusted digital agents, protecting human safety.Comment: Proceedings of the 16th European Conference on Software Architecture-Companion Volum

BAAP: A Behavioral Animation Authoring Platform for Emotion Driven 3D Virtual Characters

Abstract. Emotion, as an important aspect of human intelligence, has been playing a significant role in virtual characters. We propose an improved threelevel structure of affective model as "personality-emotion-mood" for intelligent and emotional virtual characters. We also present the emotion state space, as well as the emotion updating functions, to generate authentic and expressive emotions. In order to achieve the complexity and variety of behaviors, we bring forward a behavior organizing structure as the behavior tree, which defines four kinds of behavior organizations as well as the behavior tag and behavior message, to manage virtual characters' behaviors. At the end, we achieve an experimental platform BAAP, which prove our emotion model and behavior organizing structure to be effective and practical in generating intelligent and emotional behavioral animations. Keywords: virtual character, affective computing, behavior tree, behavioral animation, authoring platform Introduction In previous work [1], we proposed a computational emotion model which can be incorporated into physiological and social components of emotions. We improve it in this paper and present an experimental platform BAAP. We mainly focus on two subjects: emotion modeling and behavior organizing. Based on the OCEAN mode

Delegation to Virtual Agents in Critical Scenarios: Influencing Factors and Immersive Settings

Favored by the rapid advance of technologies such as artificial intelligence and computer graphics, virtual agents have been increasingly accessible, capable, and autonomous over the past decades. As a result of their growing technological prowess, interaction with virtual agents has been gradually evolving from a traditional user-tool relationship to one resembling interpersonal delegation, where users empower virtual agents to autonomously carry out specific tasks on their behalf. Forming a delegatory relationship with virtual agents can facilitate the user-agent interaction in numerous aspects, particularly regarding convenience and efficiency. Yet, it also comes with problems and challenges that may harm users drastically in critical scenarios and thus deserves extensive research. This thesis presents a thorough discussion of delegation to virtual agents based on a series of studies my colleagues and I conducted over the past four years. Several factors --including agent representation, theory of mind, rapport, and technological immersion-- are examined individually via empirical approaches to reveal their impacts on delegation to virtual agents. A conceptual model featuring three interrelated dimensions is proposed, constituting a theoretical framework to integrate the empirical findings. An overall evaluation of these works indicates that users' decisions on delegating critical tasks to virtual agents are mainly based on rational thinking. Performance-related factors have a significant impact on delegation, whereas affective cues --such as rapport, agent representation, and theory of mind-- are influential only to a limited extent. Furthermore, the usage of immersive media devices (e.g., head-mounted displays) has a marginal effect on users' delegatory decisions. Thus, it is advisable for developers to focus on performance-related aspects when designing virtual agents for critical tasks

An Ontology for 3D Environment Modeling with Smart Objects for Autonomous Digital Actors

This work is part of a project that aims at developing an Autonomous Digital Actor. Regarding this, one important problem is the interaction between autonomous digital actors and objects in a virtual environment. This research aims at studying how to design an ontology for smart objects to be used as the settings for the actors. Preliminary results are an early version of an ontology