Rui Prada

TEATRIX: Virtual Environment for Story Creation

This paper describes TEATRIX; a learning environment designed to help children, and their teachers, in the whole process of collaborative story creation. TEATRIX provides an environment where both drama and story creation are merged into one medium providing a form of collaborative makebelieve for children. While creating a story TEATRIX allows the children to interact with each other in a distributed 3D environment, by means of their chosen characters. Each character is an intelligent software agent living in the world of the story: the theatre stage. Characters that are not controlled by children act autonomously according to the actions and goals set up by their role in the story. The roles in the story are based on the work by Vladimir Propp on folk tales and can be chosen from a set that includes a villain, a hero, a princess, a helper, etc. Children not only set up the scene for the development of the play and its characters, but also do the whole performance. TEATRIX is being evaluated in a Computer Integrated Classroom (CiC) environment which is part of an EU funded project (the NIMIS project).

Heroes, villians, magicians, …: dramatis personae in a virtual story creation environment

One difficulty in creating synthetic characters for interactive stories is that these characters must convey their role in the story in a believable way. However, the relation between believability, on one side, and the role a character plays in a drama, on the other, has not yet been fully addressed. In this paper we will present a view on how to develop believable synthetic characters whose behaviour is based on a set of predefined functions (Propps functions) associated with the role they play in the story. To illustrate the approach, we will present a collaborative virtual environment, Teatrix, designed for children to build their own stories-fairy tales. In Teatrix, virtual actors play roles (such as villain, hero, magician, etc), which are functional for the development of the story. Such roles have pre-defined goals and plans, allowing the story to flow and climax situations to arise. Teatrixis already in use by children ages between 7 and 9, in the context of a Computer-Integrated Classroom scenario.

The influence of empathy in human-robot relations

The idea of robotic companions capable of establishing meaningful relationships with humans remains far from being accomplished. To achieve this, robots must interact with people in natural ways, employing social mechanisms that people use while interacting with each other. One such mechanism is empathy, often seen as the basis of social cooperation and prosocial behaviour. We argue that artificial companions capable of behaving in an empathic manner, which involves the capacity to recognise anothers affect and respond appropriately, are more successful at establishing and maintaining a positive relationship with users. This paper presents a study where an autonomous robot with empathic capabilities acts as a social companion to two players in a chess game. The robot reacts to the moves played on the chessboard by displaying several facial expressions and verbal utterances, showing empathic behaviours towards one player and behaving neutrally towards the other. Quantitative and qualitative results of 31 participants indicate that users towards whom the robot behaved empathically perceived the robot as friendlier, which supports our hypothesis that empathy plays a key role in human-robot interaction.

Creating individual agents through personality traits

In the era of globalization, concepts such as individualization and personalization become more and more important in virtual systems. With the goal of creating a more familiar interaction between human and machines, it makes sense to create a consistent and believable model of personality. This paper presents an explicit model of personality, based in the Five Factor Model, which aims at the creation of distinguishable personalities by using the personality traits to automatically influence cognitive processes: appraisal, planning, coping, and bodily expression.

Advances in Artificial Intelligence – IBERAMIA 2008

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Is the wolf angry or... just hungry

In this paper we will discuss different types of control over synthetic characters in interactive stories. We will argue that, to attain a deeper and more engaging control, in certain conditions, users should be able to inspect, disclose, and modify the characters minds. To illustrate this idea, we will present a collaborative virtual environment called {\it Teatrix}, designed for children to build their own stories - fairy tales. In {\it Teatrix}, virtual actors play roles (such as: villain, hero, etc.) and may be controlled either by children or by the system. {\it Teatrix} allows children to go into the minds of the characters through a special tool named {\it “Hot Seating”}. {\it Teatrix} is already in use by children ages between 7 and 9 in the context of a Computer integrated Classroom (CiC) scenario installed in a school. The initial evaluations show that the use of the “Hot Seatin” tool is a fundamental element for children to feel in control of their characters and thus stay in character for their virtual performances.

Why can't we be friends? an empathic game companion for long-term interaction

The ability of artificial companions (virtual agents or robots) to establish meaningful relationships with users is still limited. In humans, a key aspect of such ability is empathy, often seen as the basis of social cooperation and pro-social behaviour. In this paper, we present a study where a social robot with empathic capabilities interacts with two users playing a chess game against each other. During the game, the agent behaves in an empathic manner towards one of the players and in a neutral way towards the other. In an experiment conducted with 40 participants, results showed that users to whom the robot was empathic provided higher ratings in terms of companionship.

Towards tangibility in gameplay: building a tangible affective interface for a computer game

In this paper we describe a way of controlling the emotional states of a synthetic character in a game (FantasyA) through a tangible interface named SenToy. SenToy is a doll with sensors in the arms, legs and body, allowing the user to influence the emotions of her character in the game. The user performs gestures and movements with SenToy, which are picked up by the sensors and interpreted according to a scheme found through an initial Wizard of Oz study. Different gestures are used to express each of the following emotions: anger, fear, happiness, surprise, sadness and gloating. Depending upon the expressed emotion, the synthetic character in FantasyA will, in turn, perform different actions. The evaluation of SenToy acting as the interface to the computer game FantasyA has shown that users were able to express most of the desired emotions to influence the synthetic characters, and that overall, players, especially children, really liked the doll as an interface.

ION Framework --- A Simulation Environment for Worlds with Virtual Agents

Agents cannot be decoupled from their environment. An agent perceives and acts in a world and the model of the world influences how the agent makes decisions. Most systems with virtual embodied agents simulate the environment within a specific realization engine such as the graphics engine. As a consequence, these agents are bound to a particular kind of environment which compromises their reusability across different applications. We propose the ION Framework, a framework for simulating virtual environments which separates the simulation environment from the realization engine. In doing so, it facilitates the integration and reuse of the several components of the system. The ION Framework was used to create several 3D virtual worlds populated with autonomous embodied agents that were tested with hundreds of users.

Social Importance Dynamics: A Model for Culturally-Adaptive Agents

The unwritten rules of human cultures greatly affect social behaviour and as such should be considered in the development of socially intelligent agents. So far, there has been a large focus on modeling cultural aspects related to non-verbal behaviour such as gaze or body posture. However, culture also dictates how we perceive and treat others from a relational perspective. Namely, what do we expect from others in different social situations and how much are we willing to do for others as well. In this article we present a culturally configurable model of such social dynamics. The aim is to facilitate the creation of agents with distinct cultural behaviour, which emerges from different parametrisations of the proposed model. The practical application of the model was tested in the development of an agent-based application for intercultural training, in which the model is responsible for driving the socio-cultural behaviour of the virtual agents.