Articles

Affective Multimodal Control of Virtual Characters

Abstract

In this paper we report about the use of computer generated affect to control body and mind of cognitively modeled virtual characters. We use the computational model of affect ALMA that is able to simulate three different affect types in real-time. The computation of affect is based on a novel approach of an appraisal language. Both the use of elements of the appraisal language and the simulation of different affect types has been evaluated. Affect is used to control facial expressions, facial complexions, affective animations, posture, and idle behavior on the body layer and the selection of dialogue strategies on the mind layer. To enable a fine-grained control of these aspects a Player Markup Language (PML) has been developed. The PML is player-independent and allows a sophisticated control of character actions coordinated by high-level temporal constraints. An Action Encoder module maps the output of ALMA to PML actions using affect display rules. These actions drive the real-time rendering of affect, gesture and speech parameters of virtual characters, which we call Virtual Humans. 

Authors


Martin Klesen

Affiliation : German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI)

Country : Germany

Biography :

Martin Klesen works as a research scientist in the Intelligent User Interfaces department at the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) in Saarbrücken.


Patrick Gebhard

patrick.gebhard@dfki.de

Affiliation : German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI)

Country : Germany

Biography :

Patrick Gebhard was born in Heilbronn-Sontheim, Germany. He studied computer science and physics at the University of Saarbrücken and received his Diploma degree in 1999. 

He is working as a research scientist at the Intelligent User Interfaces department at the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) in Saarbrücken. His research interests are affective intelligent virtual agents and computational models of affect based on cognitive theories. Furthermore he is engaged in the investigation of authoring tools for interactive story telling that use multiple virtual characters. He participated in several in-house, national and international projects, including PRESENCE, SAFIRA, CROSSTALK, COHIBIT, and VIRTUALHUMAN. 

Patrick Gebhard served as a member of the program committee of the Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVA) conferences and acted as a reviewer for several major conferences in the field of intelligent user interfaces and embodied conversational agents 

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