Autonomous Secondary Gaze Behaviours

In this paper we describe secondary behaviour, this is behaviour that is generated autonomously for an avatar. The user will control various aspects of the avatars behaviour but a truly expressive avatar must produce more complex behaviour than a user could specify in real time. Secondary behaviour provides some of this expressive behaviour autonomously. However, though it is produced autonomously it must produce behaviour that is appropriate to the actions that the user is controlling (the primary behaviour) and it must produce behaviour that corresponds to what the user wants. We describe an architecture which achieves these to aims by tagging the primary behaviour with messages to be sent to the secondary behaviour and by allowing the user to design various aspects of the secondary behaviour before starting to use the avatar. We have implemented this general architecture in a system which adds gaze behaviour to user designed actions

Integrating internal behavioural models with external expression

Users will believe in a virtual character more if they can empathise with it and understand what ‘makes it tick’. This will be helped by making the motivations of the character, and other processes that go towards creating its behaviour, clear to the user. This paper proposes that this can be achieved by linking the behavioural or cognitive system of the character to expressive behaviour. This idea is discussed in general and then demonstrated with an implementation that links a simulation of perception to the animation of a character’s eyes

Customisation and Context for Expressive Behaviour in the Broadband World

The introduction of consumer broadband makes it possible to have an emotionally much richer experience of the internet. One way of achieving this is the use of animated characters endowed with emotionally expressive behaviour. This paper describes Demeanour, a framework for generating expressive behaviour, developed collaboratively by University College London and BT plc. The focus of this paper will be on two important aspects; the customisation of expressive behaviour and how expressive behaviour can be made context dependent. Customisation is a very popular feature for internet software, particularly as it allows users to present a specific identity to other users; the ability to customise beahviour will increase this sense of identity. Demeanour supports a number of user friendly methods for customisng behaviour, all of which use a character profile that ultimately controls the behaviour of the character. What counts as appropriate behaviour is highly dependent on the context, where you are, who you are talking to, whether you have a particular job or role. It is therefore very important that characters are able to exhibit different behaviours in different contexts. Demeanour allows characters to load different profiles in different contexts and therefore produce different behaviour

Efficient Clothing Fitting from Data.

A major drawback of shopping for clothes on-line is that the customer cannot try on clothes and see if they fit or suit them. One solution is to display clothing on an avatar, a 3D graphical model of the customer. However the normal technique for modeling clothing in computer graphics, cloth dynamics, suffers from being too processor intensive and is not practical for real time applications. Hence, retailers normally rely on a fixed set of body models to which clothes are pre-fitted. As the customer has to choose from this limited set the fit is typicallly not very representative of how the real clothes will fit. We propose a method that uses a compromise between these two methods. We generate a set of example avatars by performing Principal Component Analysis on a dataset of avatars. Clothes are pre-fitted to these examples off-line. Instead of asking the customer to choose from the set of examples we are able to represent the users avatar as a weighted sum of the examples, we then fit clothes as the same weighted sum over the clothes fitted to the examples

Individuality and Contextual Variation of Character Behaviour for Interactive Narrative.

This paper presents a system for generating non-verbal communication behaviour suitable for characters in interactive narrative. It is possible to customise the behaviour of individual character using a system of character profiles. This allows characters to have a strong individuality and personality. These same profiles also allow the characters’ behaviour to be altered in different contexts, allowing for suitably changing behaviour as the story unfolds