Towards Personalities for Animated Agents With Reactive and Planning Behaviors

We describe a framework for creating animated simulations of virtual human agents. The framework allows us to capture flexible patterns of activity, reactivity to a changing environment, and certain aspects of an agent personality model. Each leads to variation in how an animated simulation will be realized. As different parts of an activity make different demands oil an agent\u27s resources and decision-making, our framework allows special-purpose reasoners and planners to be associated with only those phases of an activity where they are needed. Personality is reflected in locomotion choices which are guided by an agent model that interacts with the other components of the framework

A conceptual framework for interactive virtual storytelling

This paper presents a framework of an interactive storytelling system. It can integrate five components: management centre, evaluation centre, intelligent virtual agent, intelligent virtual environment, and users, making possible interactive solutions where the communication among these components is conducted in a rational and intelligent way. Environment plays an important role in providing heuristic information for agents through communicating with the management centre. The main idea is based on the principle of heuristic guiding of the behaviour of intelligent agents for guaranteeing the unexpectedness and consistent themes

Facial actions as visual cues for personality

What visual cues do human viewers use to assign personality characteristics to animated characters? While most facial animation systems associate facial actions to limited emotional states or speech content, the present paper explores the above question by relating the perception of personality to a wide variety of facial actions (e.g., head tilting/turning, and eyebrow raising) and emotional expressions (e.g., smiles and frowns). Animated characters exhibiting these actions and expressions were presented to human viewers in brief videos. Human viewers rated the personalities of these characters using a well-standardized adjective rating system borrowed from the psychological literature. These personality descriptors are organized in a multidimensional space that is based on the orthogonal dimensions of Desire for Affiliation and Displays of Social Dominance. The main result of the personality rating data was that human viewers associated individual facial actions and emotional expressions with specific personality characteristics very reliably. In particular, dynamic facial actions such as head tilting and gaze aversion tended to spread ratings along the Dominance dimension, whereas facial expressions of contempt and smiling tended to spread ratings along the Affiliation dimension. Furthermore, increasing the frequency and intensity of the head actions increased the perceived Social Dominance of the characters. We interpret these results as pointing to a reliable link between animated facial actions/expressions and the personality attributions they evoke in human viewers. The paper shows how these findings are used in our facial animation system to create perceptually valid personality profiles based on Dominance and Affiliation as two parameters that control the facial actions of autonomous animated characters

Multispace behavioral model for face-based affective social agents

This paper describes a behavioral model for affective social agents based on three independent but interacting parameter spaces: knowledge, personality, andmood. These spaces control a lower-level geometry space that provides parameters at the facial feature level. Personality and mood use findings in behavioral psychology to relate the perception of personality types and emotional states to the facial actions and expressions through two-dimensional models for personality and emotion. Knowledge encapsulates the tasks to be performed and the decision-making process using a specially designed XML-based language. While the geometry space provides an MPEG-4 compatible set of parameters for low-level control, the behavioral extensions available through the triple spaces provide flexible means of designing complicated personality types, facial expression, and dynamic interactive scenarios

3D visual simulation of individual and crowd behavior in earthquake evacuation

Simulation of behaviors in emergencies is an interesting subject that helps to understand evacuation processes and to give out warnings for contingency plans. Individual and crowd behaviors in the earthquake are different from those under normal circumstances. Panic will spread in the crowd and cause chaos. Without considering emotion, most existing behavioral simulation methods analyze the movement of people from the point of view of mechanics. After summarizing existing studies, a new simulation method is discussed in this paper. First, 3D virtual scenes are constructed with the proposed platform. Second, an individual cognitive architecture, which integrates perception, motivation, behavior, emotion, and personality, is proposed. Typical behaviors are analyzed and individual evacuation animations are realized with data captured by motion capture devices. Quantitative descriptions are presented to describe emotional changes in individual evacuation. Facial expression animation is used to represent individuals’ emotions. Finally, a crowd behavior model is designed on the basis of a social force model. Experiments are carried out to validate the proposed method. Results showed that individuals’ behavior, emotional changes, and crowd aggregation can be well simulated. Users can learn evacuation processes from many angles. The method can be an intuitional approach to safety education and crowd management

Towards Personalities for Animated Agents with Reactive and Planning Behaviors

We describe a framework for creating animated simulations of virtual human agents. The framework allows us to capture flexible patterns of activity, reactivity to a changing environment, and certain aspects of an agent personality model. Each leads to variation in how an animated simulation will be realized. As different parts of an activity make different demands on an agent's resources and decision-making, our framework allows special-purpose reasoners and planners to be associated with only those phases of an activity where they are needed. Personality is reflected in locomotion choices which are guided by an agent model that interacts with the other components of the framework. 1 Introduction Conventional animations often seek to re-create "life" through the artistic skills of an animator who, by drawing and painting, externalizes observations, experience, and intuition into the images, shapes, and movements that make for believable characters [Thom81]. For three-dimensional comp..