85,031 research outputs found
Affect and believability in game characters:a review of the use of affective computing in games
Virtual agents are important in many digital environments. Designing a character that highly engages users in terms of interaction is an intricate task constrained by many requirements. One aspect that has gained more attention recently is the effective dimension of the agent. Several studies have addressed the possibility of developing an affect-aware system for a better user experience. Particularly in games, including emotional and social features in NPCs adds depth to the characters, enriches interaction possibilities, and combined with the basic level of competence, creates a more appealing game. Design requirements for emotionally intelligent NPCs differ from general autonomous agents with the main goal being a stronger player-agent relationship as opposed to problem solving and goal assessment. Nevertheless, deploying an affective module into NPCs adds to the complexity of the architecture and constraints. In addition, using such composite NPC in games seems beyond current technology, despite some brave attempts. However, a MARPO-type modular architecture would seem a useful starting point for adding emotions
Affect and Metaphor Sensing in Virtual Drama
We report our developments on metaphor and affect sensing for several metaphorical language phenomena including affects as external entities metaphor, food metaphor, animal metaphor, size metaphor, and anger metaphor. The metaphor and affect sensing component has been embedded in a conversational intelligent agent interacting with human users under loose scenarios. Evaluation for the detection of several metaphorical language phenomena and affect is provided. Our paper contributes to the journal themes on believable virtual characters in real-time narrative environment, narrative in digital games and storytelling and educational gaming with social software
A Mimetic Strategy to Engage Voluntary Physical Activity In Interactive Entertainment
We describe the design and implementation of a vision based interactive
entertainment system that makes use of both involuntary and voluntary control
paradigms. Unintentional input to the system from a potential viewer is used to
drive attention-getting output and encourage the transition to voluntary
interactive behaviour. The iMime system consists of a character animation
engine based on the interaction metaphor of a mime performer that simulates
non-verbal communication strategies, without spoken dialogue, to capture and
hold the attention of a viewer. The system was developed in the context of a
project studying care of dementia sufferers. Care for a dementia sufferer can
place unreasonable demands on the time and attentional resources of their
caregivers or family members. Our study contributes to the eventual development
of a system aimed at providing relief to dementia caregivers, while at the same
time serving as a source of pleasant interactive entertainment for viewers. The
work reported here is also aimed at a more general study of the design of
interactive entertainment systems involving a mixture of voluntary and
involuntary control.Comment: 6 pages, 7 figures, ECAG08 worksho
Dynamic Facial Expression of Emotion Made Easy
Facial emotion expression for virtual characters is used in a wide variety of
areas. Often, the primary reason to use emotion expression is not to study
emotion expression generation per se, but to use emotion expression in an
application or research project. What is then needed is an easy to use and
flexible, but also validated mechanism to do so. In this report we present such
a mechanism. It enables developers to build virtual characters with dynamic
affective facial expressions. The mechanism is based on Facial Action Coding.
It is easy to implement, and code is available for download. To show the
validity of the expressions generated with the mechanism we tested the
recognition accuracy for 6 basic emotions (joy, anger, sadness, surprise,
disgust, fear) and 4 blend emotions (enthusiastic, furious, frustrated, and
evil). Additionally we investigated the effect of VC distance (z-coordinate),
the effect of the VC's face morphology (male vs. female), the effect of a
lateral versus a frontal presentation of the expression, and the effect of
intensity of the expression. Participants (n=19, Western and Asian subjects)
rated the intensity of each expression for each condition (within subject
setup) in a non forced choice manner. All of the basic emotions were uniquely
perceived as such. Further, the blends and confusion details of basic emotions
are compatible with findings in psychology
I Probe, Therefore I Am: Designing a Virtual Journalist with Human Emotions
By utilizing different communication channels, such as verbal language,
gestures or facial expressions, virtually embodied interactive humans hold a
unique potential to bridge the gap between human-computer interaction and
actual interhuman communication. The use of virtual humans is consequently
becoming increasingly popular in a wide range of areas where such a natural
communication might be beneficial, including entertainment, education, mental
health research and beyond. Behind this development lies a series of
technological advances in a multitude of disciplines, most notably natural
language processing, computer vision, and speech synthesis. In this paper we
discuss a Virtual Human Journalist, a project employing a number of novel
solutions from these disciplines with the goal to demonstrate their viability
by producing a humanoid conversational agent capable of naturally eliciting and
reacting to information from a human user. A set of qualitative and
quantitative evaluation sessions demonstrated the technical feasibility of the
system whilst uncovering a number of deficits in its capacity to engage users
in a way that would be perceived as natural and emotionally engaging. We argue
that naturalness should not always be seen as a desirable goal and suggest that
deliberately suppressing the naturalness of virtual human interactions, such as
by altering its personality cues, might in some cases yield more desirable
results.Comment: eNTERFACE16 proceeding
Towards Learning ‘Self’ and Emotional Knowledge in Social and Cultural Human-Agent Interactions
Original article can be found at: http://www.igi-global.com/articles/details.asp?ID=35052 Copyright IGI. Posted by permission of the publisher.This article presents research towards the development of a virtual learning environment (VLE) inhabited by intelligent virtual agents (IVAs) and modeling a scenario of inter-cultural interactions. The ultimate aim of this VLE is to allow users to reflect upon and learn about intercultural communication and collaboration. Rather than predefining the interactions among the virtual agents and scripting the possible interactions afforded by this environment, we pursue a bottomup approach whereby inter-cultural communication emerges from interactions with and among autonomous agents and the user(s). The intelligent virtual agents that are inhabiting this environment are expected to be able to broaden their knowledge about the world and other agents, which may be of different cultural backgrounds, through interactions. This work is part of a collaborative effort within a European research project called eCIRCUS. Specifically, this article focuses on our continuing research concerned with emotional knowledge learning in autobiographic social agents.Peer reviewe
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