Addressing user’s emotions in human-computer interaction significantly enhances the believability and lifelikeness of virtual humans. Emotion recognition and interpretation is realized in our approach by integrating empathy as a designated process within the agent’s cognitive architecture. In this paper we describe this empathy process which comprises of two interconnected components: a belief-...

The inclusion of additional modalities into the communicative behavior of virtual agents besides speech has moved into focus of human-computer interface researchers, as humans are more likely to consider computer-generated figures lifelike when appropriate nonverbal behaviors are displayed in addition to speech. In this paper, we propose a knowledge-based approach for the automatic generation o...

We describe an implemented system for the simulation and visualisation of the emotional state of a multimodal conversational agent called Max. The focus of the presented work lies on modeling a coherent course of emotions over time. The basic idea of the underlying emotion system is the linkage of two interrelated psychological concepts: an emotion axis – representing short-time system states –...

This paper presents results of the plausibility evaluation of computergenerated emotions and moods. They are generated by ALMA (A Layered Model of Affect), a real-time computational model of affect, designed to serve as a modular extension for virtual humans. By a unique integration of psychological models of affect, it provides three major affect types: emotions, moods and personality that cov...

For a Reactive Virtual Trainer(RVT), subtle timing and lifelikeness of motion is of primary importance. To allow for reactivity, movement adaptation, like a change of tempo, is necessary. In this paper we investigate the relation between movement tempo, its synchronization to verbal counting, time distribution, amplitude, and left-right symmetry of a clapping movement. We analyze motion capture...

We believe that lifelikeness is important to make it possible for a communication robot to interact naturally with people. In this research we investigate the relationship between contingency and complexity in a lifelike robot. We have developed a robot control system to experimentally control contingency and complexity in interaction by combining a humanoid robot with a motion-capturing system...

BACKGROUND Two experiments investigated the effect of features of human behaviour on the quality of interaction with an Embodied Conversational Agent (ECA). METHODS In Experiment 1, visual prominence cues (head nod, eyebrow raise) of the ECA were manipulated to explore the hypothesis that likeability of an ECA increases as a function of interpersonal mimicry. In the context of an error detect...

In this paper, we present an automatic human portrait system based on the And-Or graph representation. The system can automatically generate a set of life-like portraits in different styles from a frontal face image. The system includes three subsystems, each of which models hair, face and collar respectively. The face subsystem can be further decomposed into face components: eyebrows, eyes, no...

Key posture design is commonly needed in computer animation. This paper presents an automatic and interactive whole body posture designing technique by combining the PIK (prioritized inverse kinematics) with the proposed parametric human posture splicing technique. The key feature of PIK is that the user can design a posture by adding high level constraints with different priorities. However, t...