Introducing the Cast for Social Computing: Life-Like Characters

Abstract

Life-like characters are one of the most exciting technologies for human–computer interface applications. They convincingly take the roles of virtual presenters,synthetic actors and sales personas, teammates and tutors. A common characteristicunderlying their believability or life-likeness as conversational partners iscomputational models that provide them with affective functions such as syntheticemotions and personalities, and implement human interactive behavior or presentationskills. In social computing, a paradigm that aims to support the tendency ofhumans to interact with computers as social actors, life-like characters are key. Theymay embody the interface between humans and computers, and thus improve theotherwise poor communicative capabilities of computational devices.The success of life-like character applications today relies relies on the carefulcrafting of their designers, mostly programmers. The wide dissemination of life-likecharacter technology in interactive systems, however, will greatly depend on theavailability of tools that facilitate scripting of intelligent life-like behavior. The coretasks include the synchronization of synthetic speech and gestures, the expressionof emotion and personality by means of body movement and facial display, thecoordination of the embodied conversational behavior of multiple characters possiblyincluding the user, and the design of artificial minds for synthetic characters.In this chapter we will first describe what life-like characters are, and how theydiffer from related synthetic entities. We will then explain how life-like charactertechnologies may change and improve the interaction between humans and computers.Next, we report on some of the most promising character scripting andrepresentation languages as well as authoring tools currently available. After that,the most successful life-like character systems are briefly introduced, demonstratingthe wide range of applications where embodied agents are at work. Some finalremarks on this highly active research field conclude this introductory chapter.