Creating personalities for synthetic actors. Towards autonomous personality agents (Q1355988)

The twelve technical contributions of this volume are completely reworked papers that were originally given at a workshop in Vienna, Austria. They all deal with different methodological aspects of associating personality traits with synthetic actors. In what concerns virtual humans, highest quality standards of the appearance of these actors are aimed at, i.e., photorealistic simulation of different surface such as clothes, human hair and skin, as well as the accurate presentation of single courses of actions such as grasping objects or facial expressions. Several architectures for real-time animation are considered, e.g., one incorporating reactive and planning behavior of animated agents using parallel transition networks or one based on procedural animation and behavioral scripting techniques. The virtual ethology issue is covered by a multi-level control architecture for autonomous, animated characters for use in interactive story systems. Virtual drama topics are treated in papers which focus on tools for an interactive virtual cinema and the Virtual Theater project. In that particular environment, agents are not assigned specific personalities rooted in psychological considerations but they rather are in accordance with drama theories or theories of artistic improvisation (as illustrated by various master-servant scenarios). Finally, a natural language understanding extension of the well-known Woggle world is described, which allows interaction to be based on entering text and fragments of speech. Aspects of virtual cognition are focused on in papers which discuss personality parameters as they have evolved in psychological theory, the relation of personality to emotion and to motivation, in particular, and the implications this has on the design of synthetic actors. The book also contains an extensive bibliography on personalities for synthetic actors.