Perception of Social Behavioural and Visual Realism of Virtual Character using Wii- based Tracking Device

Based on psychology literature on human emotions and the results of previous pilot experiment on emotional static body postures, we have explored the human perceptions of social behavioural and visual believability of a virtual character interacting with human users. The experiment specifically address the issues whether nonverbal expression and feedback from body movement effects users’ feeling, performance and judgments when interact with expressive virtual character. Subjects were examined across three experimental conditions that are detected participants emotional gestures, judge virtual character emotional expressions and interactions between subjects and virtual character. The results indicate that our system could detect subjects’ body movement of natural and intuitive emotional expression. Level of believability for virtual character that expresses selected emotions is high (above 3.40 mean ranks). The results also showed people having more aware of the emotions and the level of believability were increased when interact with virtual character compare to one way communication

Playing The Role: Towards An Action Selection Architecture For Believable Behaviour In Non Player Characters and Interactive Agents

Non Player Characters(NPC) in many types of video games must make believable choices in order to create player immersion and enjoyment. This thesis proposes, implements and tests a novel NPC architecture making use of Role Theory, Appraisal Theory and Utility-Based decision making

Culturally Appropriate Behavior in Virtual Agents

Social behavior cannot be considered without the culture in which it is expressed. The following is a concise state of the art review of intelligent virtual agents displaying culturally appropriate behavior in games and serious games. In particular, it focuses on agents displaying personality and emotion, and their ability to engage in social interactions with others. The relationship between the characters’ external representation and the cultural believability is highlighted; and the internal and visual aspects of the current state of the art agents are discussed. A schematic view of the literature and the elements required for embodied culturally appropriate agents is presented, offering opportunities for future research

Implementing Lexical And Creative Intentionality In Synthetic Personality

Creating engaging, interactive, and immersive synthetic characters is a difficult task and evaluating the success of a synthetic character is often even more difficult. The later problem is solved by extending Turing\u27s Imitation Game thusly: computational construct should be evaluated based on the criteria of how well the character can mimic a human. In order to accomplish a successful evaluation of the proposed metric, synthetic characters must be consistently believable and capable of role-appropriate emotional expression. The author believes traditional synthetic characters must be improved to meet this goal. For a synthetic character to be believable, human users must be able to perceive a link between the mental state of the character and its behaviors. That is to say, synthetic characters must possess intentionality. In addition to intentionality, the mental state of the character must be human-like in order to provide an adequate frame of reference for the human users\u27 internal simulations, to wit, the character\u27s mental state must be comprised of a synthetic model of personality, of personality dynamics, and of cognition, each of which must be psychologically valid and of sufficient fidelity for the type of character represented. The author proposes that synthetic characters possessing these three models are more accurately described as synthetic personalities. The author proposes and implements computational models of personality, personality dynamics, and cognition in order to evaluate the psychological veracity of these models and computational equivalence between the models and the implementation as a first step in the process of creating believable synthetic personalities

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

Comprehensive Believable Non Player Characters Creation and Management Tools for Emergent Gameplay

This thesis seeks a way to integrate popular psychosocial components required for believability to build a believable Non Player Characters (NPCs) model using the techniques of emergence. The believable NPCs model is scalable in terms of psychosocial models, customizable, flexible and data-driven. Comprehensive believable NPCs creation and management tools were developed to compose, generate, and maintain the system configuration data, as well as NPC profile data, using XML. Furthermore, a run-time prototype has been developed based on our proposed model to test its effectiveness. The prototype has also been evaluated for believable emergent behaviours in different social scenarios

Investigation of an emotional virtual human modelling method

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University.In order to simulate virtual humans more realistically and enable them life-like behaviours, several exploration research on emotion calculation, synthetic perception, and decision making process have been discussed. A series of sub-modules have been designed and simulation results have been presented with discussion. A visual based synthetic perception system has been proposed in this thesis, which allows virtual humans to detect the surrounding virtual environment through a collision-based synthetic vision system. It enables autonomous virtual humans to change their emotion states according to stimuli in real time. The synthetic perception system also allows virtual humans to remember limited information within their own First-in-first-out short-term virtual memory. The new emotion generation method includes a novel hierarchical emotion structure and a group of emotion calculation equations, which enables virtual humans to perform emotionally in real-time according to their internal and external factors. Emotion calculation equations used in this research were derived from psychologic emotion measurements. Virtual humans can utilise the information in virtual memory and emotion calculation equations to generate their own numerical emotion states within the hierarchical emotion structure. Those emotion states are important internal references for virtual humans to adopt appropriate behaviours and also key cues for their decision making. The work introduces a dynamic emotional motion database structure for virtual human modelling. When developing realistic virtual human behaviours, lots of subjects were motion-captured whilst performing emotional motions with or without intent. The captured motions were endowed to virtual characters and implemented in different virtual scenarios to help evoke and verify design ideas, possible consequences of simulation (such as fire evacuation). This work also introduced simple heuristics theory into decision making process in order to make the virtual human’s decision making more like real human. Emotion values are proposed as a group of the key cues for decision making under the simple heuristic structures. A data interface which connects the emotion calculation and the decision making structure together has also been designed for the simulation system