Exploiting Models of Personality and Emotions to Control the Behavior of Animated Interactive Agents

The German Research Centre for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) recently started three new projects1 to advance our understanding of the fundamental technology required to drive the social behaviour of interactive animated agents. This initiative has been timed to catch the current wave of research and commercial interest in the field of lifelike characters [1] and affective user interfaces [14,20]. The Puppet project promotes the idea of a virtual puppet theatre as an interactive learning environment to support the development of a child’s emotional intelligence skills. The second project features an Inhabited Market Place in which personality traits are used to modify the characters’ roles of virtual actors in sales presentations. The Presence project uses an internal model of the agent’s (and possibly the user’s) affective state to guide the conversational dialogue between agent and user. Although all three projects rely on a more or less similar approach towards modelling emotions and personality traits, there are variations with regard to the underlying user-agent(s) relationship(s), the factors that influence an agent’s emotional state, the complexity of the underlying model of emotions and the way in which emotions and personality traits are made observable.