Abstract:Nonverbal communication is an ~mportant aspect of real-life face-to-face interaction and one of the most efficient ways to convey emotions, therefore users should be provided the means to replicate it in the virtual world. Because articulated embodiments are well suited to provide body communication in virtual environments, this paper first reviews some of the advantages and disadvantages of complex embodiments. After a brief introduction to nonverbal communication theories, we present our solution, taking into account the practical limitations of input devices and social science aspects. We introduce our sample of actions and implementation using our VLNET (Virtual Life Network) networked virtual environment and discuss the results of an informal evaluation experiment.

Abstract:The creation of virtual humans capable of behaving and interacting realistically with each other requires the development of autonomous believable social agents. Standard goal-oriented approaches are not well suited to it because they don't take into account important characteristics identified by the social sciences. This paper tackles the issue of a general social reasoning mechanism, discussing its basic functional requirements using a sociological perspective, and proposing a high-level architecture based on Roles, Norms, Values and Types.

This paper introduces four sociological concepts which we argue are important for the creation of autonomous social agents capable of behaving and interacting realistically with each other as virtual humans. A list of functional requirements based on these concepts is then proposed.

The MPEG-4 standard specifies a set of low-level animation parameters for body animation, but does not provide any high-level functionality for the control of avatars or embodied agents. In this paper, we discuss the required features for a script format allowing designers to easily specify complex bodily behaviors, and describe a system and its associated syntax -Body Animation Script (BAS) -which fulfills these requirements in a flexible way. The described architecture allows the organization and parametrization of predefined MPEG-4 animations and their integration with real-time algorithmic animations, such as pointing at a specific location or walking. This system has been implemented at EPFL in the framework of the EU SoNG project, in order to allow intelligent software agents to control their 3D graphical representation and end-users to trigger rich nonverbal behaviors from an online interface. It has been integrated into AML -the Avatar Markup Language.