Believable conversational agents for teaching ancient history and culture in 3D virtual worlds

University of Technology, Sydney. Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology.This thesis introduces believable conversational agents as an engaging and motivational learning tool for teaching ancient history and culture in virtual worlds. Traditional approaches are lacking engagement, interactivity and socialisation, features that are of tremendous importance to modern students (digital natives). At the same time, modern 3D visualisations primarily focus on the design side of the given space and neglect the actual inhabitants of these ancient places. As a consequence, in such historical or cultural 3D visualisations it is difficult to engage the students in the learning process and to keep track of students' learning progress. Furthermore, this approach neglects the knowledge carriers (inhabitants of the ancient site) which are an important part of a particular culture and played an important role in significant historical events. Embodied conversational agents envisaged by this thesis for teaching ancient history and culture must be believable as they act in highly dynamic and heterogeneous environments such as 3D Virtual Worlds with both human and autonomous agent participants. In these virtual environments participants behave autonomously and frequently interact with each other and with software agents. Therefore, embodied conversational agents must know their surroundings, be aware of their own state in the virtual environment and possess a detailed knowledge of their own interactions as well as the interactions of other participants. We label such agent abilities as "awareness believability" and develop the necessary theoretical background and the formalisation of this concept. We also discuss the I2B (Interactive, Intelligent and Believable) framework that implements awareness believability using the combination of the Virtual Institutions technology, the AIML engine and the visualisation layer of Virtual Worlds. Through a detailed literature review on virtual agents' believability we identified the ability to continuously learn new conversational skills as another important aspect of being believable. Thus, this thesis also explains how AIML specific rules and virtual agents' interactions with subject matter experts help to dynamically improve the conversational corpus of virtual agents via imitation learning. To validate the impact of supplying agents with awareness believability we conducted a number of case studies specific to the domain of ancient history and culture. The studies confirmed that the identified awareness features are indeed making the agents perceived as more believable. Furthermore, the studies provide important evidence in favour of using virtual agents for improving the knowledge of students in the domain of ancient history and culture

Virtually real or really virtual: towards a heritage metaverse

The hype surrounding the impending mainstreaming of Virtual Reality can seem to prioritize the digital above the critical. With the development of VR said to be at a pivotal point, there is an important opportunity to consider the emergence of virtual heritage and its potential futures. This paper argues that there is a disjunction between the present reality of virtual heritage and virtual reality, and discusses the twin challenges of presence and realism within virtual reality. In particular, it highlights a paradox inherent in virtual heritage and virtual reality and proposes the use of ‘loose-realism’ as a solution. Ultimately, the challenge is to address the claims that virtual reality represents a new class of information system, or metaverse, in order that virtual heritage fully engages with enquiry about the pas

E-AI : an emotion architecture for agents in games & virtual worlds

Characters in games and virtual worlds continue to gain improvements in both their visual appearance and more human-like behaviours with each successive generation of hardware. One area that seemingly would need to be addressed if this evolution in human-like characters is to continue is in the area of characters with emotions. To begin addressing this, the thesis focuses on answering the question “Can an emotional architecture be developed for characters in games and virtual worlds, that is built upon a foundation of formal psychology? Therefore a primary goal of the research was to both review and consolidate a range of background material based on the psychology of emotions to provide a cohesive foundation on which to base any subsequent work. Once this review was completed, a range of supplemental material was investigated including computational models of emotions, current implementations of emotions in games and virtual worlds, machine learning techniques suitable for implementing aspects of emotions in characters in virtual world, believability and the role of emotions, and finally a discussion of interactive characters in the form of chat bots and non-player characters. With these reviews completed, a synthesis of the research resulted in the defining of an emotion architecture for use with pre-existing agent behaviour systems, and a range of evaluation techniques applicable to agents with emotions. To support validation of the proposed architecture three case studies were conducted that involved applying the architecture to three very different software platforms featuring agents. The first was applying the architecture to combat bots in Quake 3, the second to a chat bot in the virtual world Second Life, and the third was to a web chat bot used for e-commerce, specifically dealing with question and answers about the companies services. The three case studies were supported with several small pilot evaluations that were intended to look at different aspects of the implemented architecture including; (1) Whether or not users noticed the emotional enhancements. Which in the two small pilot studies conducted, highlighted that the addition of emotions to characters seemed to affect the user experience when the encounter was more interactive such as in the Second Life implementation. Where the interaction occurred in a combat situation with enemies with short life spans, the user experience seemed to be greatly reduced. (2) An evaluation was conducted on how the combat effectiveness of combat bots was affected by the addition of emotions, and in this pilot study it was found that the combat effectiveness was not quite statistically reduced, even when the bots were running away when afraid, or attacking when angry even if close to death. In summary, an architecture grounded in formal psychology is presented that is suitable for interactive characters in games and virtual worlds, but not perhaps ideal for applications where user interaction is brief such as in fast paced combat situations. This architecture has been partially validated through three case studies and includes suggestions for further work especially in the mapping of secondary emotions, the emotional significance of conversations, and the need to conduct further evaluations based on the pilot studies.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

AI and Gender in Persuasion: Using Chatbots to Prevent Driving Under The Influence of Marijuana

Will new media techniques, such as artificial intelligence (AI), help refresh public safety advertising campaigns and help better target specific populations, and aid in persuasive, preventative marketing? This paper used hypocrisy induction as a persuasive tool for standalone artificial intelligence chatbots to test potential behavioral change in the context of marijuana. This research further tested whether the chatbots\u27 gender and language styles impact how persuasive and effective the chat agents are perceived to be using hypocrisy induction. An online experiment conducted with 705 participants (Mage = 42.9, 392 women). where participants interact with a chatbot that is manipulated as male/female and uses formal/causal language. Half of the participants received the hypocrisy induction manipulation. hypocrisy induction is more effective when chatbot gender and linguistic styles are appropriately paired. Participants in the hypocrisy induction condition exhibited higher WTP than those in the non-hypocrisy induction condition when the chatbot they interacted with was female in gender and used casual language. However, hypocrisy induction increased WTP than those who did not receive the hypocrisy induction manipulation when the gender of the chatbot they interacted with was male and used formal language. To the researchers\u27 knowledge, this is among the first studies testing the persuasive power of hypocrisy induction using new media platforms in public safety and health advertising in marijuana studies. Findings not only help to shed light on the persuasiveness of gender and language in standalone chatbots but also provide practical implications for practitioners on the future usage of chatbots

Directed Emergent Drama

A fully interactive drama, where the player interacts with intelligent Non- Player Characters (NPCs), can revolutionise entertainment, gaming, education, and therapy. Creating such a genuinely interactive drama that is entertaining and gives players a sense of coherency as active participants in the unfolding drama has seen a substantial research effort. Authors have the power to shape dramatised stories for theatre or television at will. Conversely, the authors' ability to shape interactive drama is limited because the drama emerges from players' and NPCs actions during game-play, which significantly limits authoring control. A coherent drama has a recognisable dramatic structure. One philosophy is to use planning algorithms and narrative structures to reduce required authoring. However, planning algorithms are intractable for the large state-spaces intrinsic to interactive dramas, and they have not reduced the authoring problem sufficiently. A more straightforward and computationally feasible method is emergent interactive drama from players' and NPCs' actions. The main difficulty with this approach is maintaining a drama structure and theme, such as a mystery theme or a training scenario, that the player experiences while interacting with the game world. Therefore, it is necessary to impose some form of structure to guide or direct the unfolding drama. The solution introduced in this thesis is to distribute the computation among autonomous actors that are guided by goals and drama structures which a centralised autonomous director agent distributes among the actors, which comprises the following four main elements: a) autonomous rational actor agents that know they are acting and can negotiate dialogues between them to remain realistic while simultaneously progressing the drama, without the player knowing, b) Bayesian network to model the actors reasoning, including beliefs about other actors' mental states c) an autonomous director agent uses "schemas", conceptual structures based on motifs, to guide the actors

Intrinsic Motivation in Computational Creativity Applied to Videogames

PhD thesisComputational creativity (CC) seeks to endow artificial systems with creativity. Although human creativity is known to be substantially driven by intrinsic motivation (IM), most CC systems are extrinsically motivated. This restricts their actual and perceived creativity and autonomy, and consequently their benefit to people. In this thesis, we demonstrate, via theoretical arguments and through applications in videogame AI, that computational intrinsic reward and models of IM can advance core CC goals. We introduce a definition of IM to contextualise related work. Via two systematic reviews, we develop typologies of the benefits and applications of intrinsic reward and IM models in CC and game AI. Our reviews highlight that related work is limited to few reward types and motivations, and we thus investigate the usage of empowerment, a little studied, information-theoretic intrinsic reward, in two novel models applied to game AI. We define coupled empowerment maximisation (CEM), a social IM model, to enable general co-creative agents that support or challenge their partner through emergent behaviours. Via two qualitative, observational vignette studies on a custom-made videogame, we explore CEM’s ability to drive general and believable companion and adversary non-player characters which respond creatively to changes in their abilities and the game world. We moreover propose to leverage intrinsic reward to estimate people’s experience of interactive artefacts in an autonomous fashion. We instantiate this proposal in empowerment-based player experience prediction (EBPXP) and apply it to videogame procedural content generation. By analysing think-aloud data from an experiential vignette study on a dedicated game, we identify several experiences that EBPXP could predict. Our typologies serve as inspiration and reference for CC and game AI researchers to harness the benefits of IM in their work. Our new models can increase the generality, autonomy and creativity of next-generation videogame AI, and of CC systems in other domains

Multi-agent Communication Protocols with Emergent Behaviour

The emergent behaviour of a multiagent system depends on the component agents and how they interact. A critical part of interaction between agents is communication. This thesis presents a multi-agent system communication model for physical moving agents. The work presented in this thesis provides all the tools to create a physical multi-agent communication system. The model integrates different agent technologies at both the micro and macro level. The micro structure involves the architecture of the individual components in the system whilst the macro structure involves the interaction relationships between these individual components in the system. Regarding the micro structure of the system, the model provides the description of a novel hybrid BDI-Blackboard architectured agent that builds-in a hybrid of reactive and deliberative agent. The macro structure of the system, provided by this model, provides the operational specifications of the communication protocols. The thesis presents a theory of communication that integrates an animal intelligence technique together with a cognitive intelligence one. This results in a local co-ordination of movements, and global task coordination. Accordingly, agents are designed to communicate with other agents in order to coordinate their movements via a set of behavioural rules. These behavioural rules allow a simple directed flocking behaviour to emerge. A flocking algorithm is used because it satisfies a major objective, i.e. it has a real time response to local environmental changes and minimises the cost of path planning. A higher level communication mechanism is implemented for task distribution that is carried out via a blackboard conversation and ii negotiation process with a ground based controller. All the tasks are distributed as team tasks. A novel utilization of speech acts as communication utterances through a blackboard negotiation process is proposed. In order to implement the proposed communication model, a virtual environment is built that satisfies the realism of representing the agents, environment, and the sensors as well as representing the actions. The virtual environment used in the work is built as a semi-immersive full-scale environment and provides the visualisation tools required to test, modify, compare and evaluate different behaviours under different conditions. The visualization tools allow the user to visualize agents negotiations and interacting with them. The 3D visualisation and simulation tools allow the communication protocol to be tested and the emergent behaviour to be seen in an easy and understandable manner. The developed virtual environment can be used as a toolkit to test different communication protocols and different agent’s architecture in real time