Scripting affective communication with life-like characters in web-based interaction systems

Abstract

In this paper, we discuss scripting tools that aim at facilitating the design of Web-based interactions with animated characters capable of affective communication. Speci cally, two systems are developed. The SCREAM system is a scripting tool that enables authors to create emotionally and socially appropriate responses of animated characters. Content authors may design the mental make-up of a character by declaring a variety of parameters and behaviors relevant to affective communication and obtain quanti ed emotional reactions that can be input to an animation engine. While the default operations of a character' s`m ind' ' are based on psychological and sociological research, authors may easily modify and extend its rule set. In order to facilitate high-level scripting and connectivity with other Web-based animated agent systems, the tool is written in a lightweight JAVA-based PROL OG system and JAVA. Connectivity is demonstrated by interfacing SCREAM with our second system, MPML , an XML -style markup language that allows to control and coordinate the multi-modal appearance of synthetic characters. Affective communication with animated characters is illustrated by the implementation of a Web-based casino scenario.

STEP: a Scripting Language for Embodied Agents

“…In [17], Prendinger et al are also using a Prolog-based scripting approach for animated characters but they focus on higher-level concepts such as affect and social context. In [18], Prendinger et al discuss the systems MPML and SCREAM, an approach of scripting the bodies and minds of life-like characters.…”

Face Modeling and Animation Language for MPEG-4 XMT Framework

“…The absence of a dedicated language for face animation, as an abstraction on top of FACS AUs or MPEG-4 FAPs, has been evident especially within the XMT framework. Recent advances in developing and using Embodied Conversational Agents (ECAs), especially their web-based applications, and growing acceptance of XML as a data representation language, have drawn attention to markup languages for virtual characters [19]- [22]. The basic idea is to define specific XML tags related to agents' actions such as moving and talking.…”

“…These take a time value in seconds or milliseconds and are defined for all elements in EML and FAML, i.e., for those parts of VHML concerned with animation. A simple VHML/FAML document looks like this Multimodal Presentation Markup Language (MPML) [22] is another XML-based markup language developed to enable the description of multimodal presentation on the WWW, based on animated characters (http://www.miv.t.u-tokyo.ac.jp/MPML/en). It offers functionalities for synchronizing media presentation (reusing parts of the Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language, SMIL) and new XML elements such as (basic interactivity), (decision making), (spoken by a TTS-system),…”

A Study in Users' Physiological Response to an Empathic Interface Agent

“…This situation is surprising given the large body of literature asserting the key importance and positive effect of emotion-based virtual agents on users' interaction experience. [4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13] Studies that systematically investigated and compared the impact of various types of life-like agents report on often inconsistent results.…”