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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.

The Oz project at Carnegie Mellon is developing technology for dramatic virtual worlds. One requirement of such worlds is the presence of broad, though perhaps shallow, agents. To support our needs, we are developing an agent architecture that provides goals and goal directed reactive behavior, emotional state and its effects on behavior, some natural language abilities (especially pragmatics based language generation), and some memory and inference abilities. We are limiting each of these capacities whenever necessary to allow us to build a broadly capable, integrated agent.In attempting to construct a broad agent, constraints seem to arise between components of the architecture. In this brief note, we discuss some of these constraints.

This work was supported in part by Fujitsu Laboratories, Ltd. and Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs. The views and conclusions contained in this document are those of the authors and should not be interpreted as representing the official policies, either expressed or implied, of Fujitsu Laboratories, Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs or any other parties.

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