ENABL: A Modular Authoring Interface for Creating Interactive Characters

The authoring of interactive digital characters is a complicated and multidisciplinary task which requires some level of expertise in psychology, artificial intelligence, computer graphics, as well as many other fields depending on the purpose of the agent. Demand for high-quality agents is enormous: current research involves interactive agents for many topics including education, medicine, human caregiving, interactive drama, and video games. However, experts able to author these agents are few in number, and supply is falling far short of demand. This work aims to develop a publicly releasable authoring environment for an existing reactive planning behavior language (ABL: A Behavior Language), which significantly reduces the authoring complexity and burden in creating interactive digital characters. By reifying existing coding practices and patterns by expert authors into an authoring environment, authors with some programming background will be able to create interactive characters for any field or subject matter much more quickly and easily than with the programming language alone. Ultimately, the breadth and depth of interactive experiences involving agents will vastly increase, which may revolutionize current approaches to education, video games, and many other fields.