System for authoring highly interactive, personality-rich interactive characters

Abstract

We describe an innovative system for authoring expressive, fully autonomous interactive characters. The focus of our work is creating a system to allow rich authoring that captures as much of the artistic intent of the author in procedural form as we can, and that provides automatic support for expressive execution of that content. The system is composed of two parts: (1) a programming language with unusual language features including concurrency, reflection, backtracking, continuously monitored expressions, and a model of emotion, that was created for the expression of interactive self-animating characters; and (2) a motion synthesis system that combines hand-animated motion data with artistically authored procedures for generalizing the motion while preserving the artistic intent. This system has been used to create over a dozen interactive characters, which have been shown at juried venues, as well as being deployed commercially. We describe how artistic qualities important to interactive characters are encoded and supported using this system, and demonstrate the system with an implemented interactive character.

BAAP: A Behavioral Animation Authoring Platform for Emotion Driven 3D Virtual Characters

“…Loyall [9] described an innovative system for authoring expressive, autonomous interactive characters. However, it focuses on building specific and unique believable characters, where the goal is artistic abstraction of reality, not biologically plausible behavior.…”

Elckerlyc

“…Loyall et al [10] describe a system that allows the authoring of highly interactive motion and demonstrate their approach in an interactive game with a personality-rich character. The behavior of this character is even more tightly coupled to changes in the environment (a bouncing ball, moving mouse, etc.…”

“…Like Loyall et al [10] we offer synchronization to the anticipation of user behavior (e.g. what is the tempo that the musicians are playing in).…”

Populating Reconstructed Archaeological Sites with Autonomous Virtual Humans

“…Prompted by the seminal work of Reynolds [9], behavioral animation has been further developed to simulate artificial animals [10,11,12] and it has given impetus to an entire industry of applications for distributed (multiagent) behavioral systems that are capable of synthesizing flocking, schooling, herding, and other behaviors for lower animals, or in the case of human characters, crowd behavior. Numerous crowd interaction models have been developed [13,14,15,16] and work in this area continues.…”