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.
Abstract. We present a model of interpersonal attitude used for generating expressive postures for computer animated characters. Our model consists of two principle dimensions, affiliation and status. It takes into account the relationships between the attitudes of two characters and allows for a large degree of variation between characters, both in how they react to other characters' behaviour and in the ways in which they express attitude.Human bodies are highly expressive, a casual observation of a group of people will reveal a large variety of postures. Some people stand straight, while others are slumped or hunched over; some people have very asymmetric postures; heads can be held at many different angles, and arms can adopt a huge variety of postures each with a different meaning: hands on hips or in pockets; arms crossed; scratching the head or neck, or fiddling with clothing. Computer animated character often lack this variety of expression and can seem stiff and robotic, however, posture has been relatively little studied in the field of expressive virtual characters. It is a useful cue as it is very clearly visible and can be displayed well on even fairly graphically simple characters. Posture is particularly associated with expressing relationships between people or their attitude to each other, for example a close posture displays a liking while drawing up to full height displays a dominant attitude. Attitude is also an area of expressive behaviour that has been less studied than say, emotion. As such we have chosen to base our model of gesture generation primarily on attitude rather than emotion or other factors.
Abstract. If intelligent virtual agents are to become widely adopted it is vital that they can be designed using the user friendly graphical tools that are used in other areas of graphics. However, extending this sort of tool to autonomous, interactive behaviour, an area with more in common with artificial intelligence, is not trivial. This paper discusses the issues involved in creating user-friendly design tools for IVAs and proposes an extension of the direct manipulation methodology to IVAs. It also presents an initial implementation of this methodology.
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