63,101 research outputs found
Designing friends
Embodied Conversational Agents are virtual humans that can interact with humans using verbal and non-verbal forms of communication. In most cases, they have been designed for short interactions. This paper asks the question how one would start to design synthetic characters that can become your friends. We look at insights from social psychology and propose a methodology for designing friends
The Challenge of Believability in Video Games: Definitions, Agents Models and Imitation Learning
In this paper, we address the problem of creating believable agents (virtual
characters) in video games. We consider only one meaning of believability,
``giving the feeling of being controlled by a player'', and outline the problem
of its evaluation. We present several models for agents in games which can
produce believable behaviours, both from industry and research. For high level
of believability, learning and especially imitation learning seems to be the
way to go. We make a quick overview of different approaches to make video
games' agents learn from players. To conclude we propose a two-step method to
develop new models for believable agents. First we must find the criteria for
believability for our application and define an evaluation method. Then the
model and the learning algorithm can be designed
Controlling the Gaze of Conversational Agents
We report on a pilot experiment that investigated the effects of different eye gaze behaviours of a cartoon-like talking face on the quality of human-agent dialogues. We compared a version of the talking face that roughly implements some patterns of human-like behaviour with\ud
two other versions. In one of the other versions the shifts in gaze were kept minimal and in the other version the shifts would occur randomly. The talking face has a number of restrictions. There is no speech recognition, so questions and replies have to be typed in by the users\ud
of the systems. Despite this restriction we found that participants that conversed with the agent that behaved according to the human-like patterns appreciated the agent better than participants that conversed with the other agents. Conversations with the optimal version also\ud
proceeded more efficiently. Participants needed less time to complete their task
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