EMBR: A realtime animation engine for interactive embodied agents

Embodied agents can be powerful interface devices and versatile research tools for the study of emotion, gesture, facial expression etc. However, they require high effort and expertise for their creation, assembly and animation control. Therefore, open animation engines and high-level control languages are required to make embodied agents accessible to researchers and developers. In this demo paper, we present such an engine called EMBR (Embodied Agents Behavior Realizer) and its control language EMBRScript. EMBR produces real time multimodal animations specified in the EMBRScript language. EMBR is robust and reactive enouth to cope with interruptive events from the user. Finally, EMBR and all its components, from assets creation to rendering will be freely available.

[1]  Han Noot,et al.  Variations in gesturing and speech by GESTYLE , 2005, Int. J. Hum. Comput. Stud..

[2]  Sotaro Kita,et al.  Movement Phase in Signs and Co-Speech Gestures, and Their Transcriptions by Human Coders , 1997, Gesture Workshop.

[3]  Stacy Marsella,et al.  SmartBody: behavior realization for embodied conversational agents , 2008, AAMAS.

[4]  Stefan Kopp,et al.  The Behavior Markup Language: Recent Developments and Challenges , 2007, IVA.

[5]  Maurizio Mancini,et al.  Design and evaluation of expressive gesture synthesis for embodied conversational agents , 2005, AAMAS '05.

[6]  Justine Cassell,et al.  BEAT: the Behavior Expression Animation Toolkit , 2001, Life-like characters.

[7]  Michael Neff,et al.  Towards Natural Gesture Synthesis: Evaluating Gesture Units in a Data-Driven Approach to Gesture Synthesis , 2007, IVA.

[8]  Michael Kipp,et al.  ANVIL - a generic annotation tool for multimodal dialogue , 2001, INTERSPEECH.

[9]  Maurizio Mancini,et al.  Implementing Expressive Gesture Synthesis for Embodied Conversational Agents , 2005, Gesture Workshop.

[10]  Hans-Peter Seidel,et al.  Annotated New Text Engine Animation Animation Lexicon Animation Gesture Profiles MR : . . . JL : . . . Gesture Generation Video Annotated Gesture Script , 2007 .

[11]  Matthew Stone,et al.  Speaking with hands: creating animated conversational characters from recordings of human performance , 2004, SIGGRAPH 2004.

[12]  Mark Steedman,et al.  APML, a Markup Language for Believable Behavior Generation , 2004, Life-like characters.

[13]  Michael Neff,et al.  An annotation scheme for conversational gestures: how to economically capture timing and form , 2007, Lang. Resour. Evaluation.

[14]  Stefan Kopp,et al.  Synthesizing multimodal utterances for conversational agents , 2004, Comput. Animat. Virtual Worlds.

[15]  Stefan Kopp,et al.  Towards a Common Framework for Multimodal Generation: The Behavior Markup Language , 2006, IVA.

[16]  Bobby Bodenheimer,et al.  Synthesis and evaluation of linear motion transitions , 2008, TOGS.

[17]  A. Kendon Gesture: Visible Action as Utterance , 2004 .

[18]  D. McNeill Hand and Mind: What Gestures Reveal about Thought , 1992 .