Social Puppets: Towards Modular Social Animation for Agents and Avatars

Abstract

Abstract. State-of-the-art computer graphics can give autonomous agents a compelling appearance as animated virtual characters. Typically the agents are directly responsible for controlling their graphical representation, but this places too much burden on the agents that already deal with difficult high-level tasks such as dialog planning. This paper presents work, done in the context of an interactive language and culture training system, on a new kind of engine that fits between the high level cognitive agent models and the animated graphics that represent them. This is a social engine that generates socially appropriate nonverbal behavior based on rules reflecting social norms. Similar to modular physics engines, the social engine introduces a re-usable component that can heighten believability of animated agents in games and simulations with relatively little effort.

Fostering Character Education with Games and Interactive Story Generation

“…"Stories are connections to the past and yet carry us into the future; they speak of relationships, of human connections, and to what gives quality to our lives." (Simpson, 1998) In the last decade, there has been a significant growth in integrating narrative in education (Riedl & Stern, 2006;Thomas & Young, 2007;Vilhjalmsson et al, 2007;McQuiggan et al, 2008;Mckenzie& McCalla, 2009). Interactive narrative brings students through a deep story experience, and has proven to be successful in creating enriching experiences for its users, sparking problem-solving skills and individual and group decision-making skills (Bayon et al, 2003).…”

“…It assists in providing a personalized learning process based on the student"s strengths, his weaknesses and his needs. The TLCTS educational game (Vilhjalmsson et al, 2007) has a student model in its environment that is updated only based on the student"s explicit actions and does not consider the student"s intentions. TLTS (Johnson et al, 2004) is an interactive educational game that uses a student model to provide an adaptive learning process and simulates dialogues.…”

First Impressions in Human--Agent Virtual Encounters

“…In a later version of the system [Vilhjálmsson et al, 2007b], an agent's reactions at the communicative function level were managed by a Social Puppet component coupled with each agent. The social puppet component allowed the agents to accomplish the functions in several ways.…”

Innovative Integrated Architecture for Educational Games: Challenges and Merits

“…The scripted approach has also been used by the game-like environment ELECT BiLAT, a culturally sensitive negotiations simulator that trains high ranking military officers to achieve their military objectives in the field [1]. More edugames are the Tactical Language Trainer System (TLTS) that teaches trainees proper verbal, body language and cultural skills for different languages [15] and the TLCTS edugame developed to help people to acquire communicative skills in foreign languages and cultures [16]. The TLCTS edugame uses pre-authored descriptions of scenes, which identify characters, stage settings, and possible dialog exchanges between characters.…”

“…Students could benefit from having tutorial guidance when playing educational games as they tend to perform better in more structured pedagogical activities [27]. Some edugames have recognized the importance of employing a student model such as ELECT BILAT [1], BAT ILE [14], TLTS [15], TLCTS [16], Mimesis [17], IN-TALE [21], ISAT [28] and ELEKTRA [29]. Riedl and Stern (2006) believe that narrative and interactivity are diametrically opposed [21].…”