Patrick Doyle

Believability through context using "knowledge in the world" to create intelligent characters

Intelligent characters are presently quite limited. How useful and how believable they are depends on the extent to which they are integrated into a specific environment for a particular set of tasks. This tight integration of character and context is an inadequate approach in the rapidly-expanding realm of large, diverse, structurally homogeneous but disparate virtual environments, of which the Web is only the most obvious example. By separating a characters core features, which are invariable, from its knowledge of and abilities in any specific environment, and embedding this latter information as annotations in the environment itself, we can significantly improve the characters believability, its utility, and its reusability across a variety of domains.This paper describes an agent architecture that can interact with an annotated virtual environment, together with a structure for representing information in and about these environments. We also present an example applying this approach to intelligent characters in a complex virtual world.

The blind men and the elephant revisited

The construction of embodied conversational agents is an ambitious, complex, and essentially interdisciplinary process. This is inevitable given the depth, sophistication, and many modalities of the products we seek to create. Other chapters in this book address methods for evaluating ECAs as artefacts or according to their usability. In this chapter, we offer a complementary perspective: grounding the evaluation of ECAs in the context of the different disciplines that have merged to create the research community constructing them.

Tigrito: a multi-mode interactive improvisational agent

This paper presents the implementation of Tigrito, an affective computer character. We outline how Tigrito can be used to study chidren’s sense of engagement and relationship with virtual toys in different modes of interaction.

An intelligent guide for virtual environments

In T. H. Whites famous retelli ng of the Arthurian legend, the aged wizard Merlyn is tutor to the young boy Wart, who will grow up to be King Arthur. Through his magic, Merlyn changes Wart into different creatures and transports him to alien environments so he can learn about worlds other than his own. In this paper, we introduce Merlyn as an autonomous intelli gent agent, whose purpose is to be a guide and companion to children in their explorations of virtual worlds. Merlyn has an integrated personality and variable moods, so he will be a companion rather than a tool for the childs use. We discuss how Merlyn operates in “annotated environments,” where the perceived world is reflected in data structures directly accessible to a broad variety of agents. Merlyn becomes more knowledgeable about such worlds as he travels with the child, and he can use these annotations to guide his choice of interactions. Annotations also allow Merlyn to “endow” the child with environment-specific capabiliti es to guide the childs experiential learning. Merlyn is also capable of monitoring the childs interests and abiliti es, and tailoring his personality and actions to them. With Merlyn as a companion, a child can be guided into strategically-chosen learning activities while having a friendly, entertaining experience in the virtual environment.