Social Computing Life-like Characters as Social Actors

Social Computing aims to support the tendency of humans to interact with computers as if they were veritable social actors. Technology that reinforces the bias toward social interaction by producing appropriate responses may improve the communication between humans and computational devices. We believe that the most natural way to realize social computing is by using life-like synthetic characters with context aware affective behavior. We will describe an architecture for emotion-based agents (SCREAM) that allows to automatically generate emotionally and socially appropriate responses of synthetic characters. The proposed system is intended as a scripting tool where content authors state the mental make-up of an agent by declaring a variety of parameters and behaviors relevant to affective communication and obtain quantified emotional reactions which are then input to an animation engine visualizing the agent as 2D animation sequences. Three web-based interaction scenarios featuring life-like animated characters will highlight individual aspects of (simplified versions of) our system. Moreover, we will discuss narrative intelligence as a promising technology to complement characters’ socially intelligent behavior. Since people make sense of the behavior of others by structuring their behavior into narrative, this field might contribute to objective of social computing.