Animating conversation in online games

Abstract

When players in online games engage in conversation with each other, often through a chat window, their graphical avatars typically do not exhibit interesting behavior. This paper proposes using a model of face-to-face communication to automatically generate realistic nonverbal behavior in the avatars based on what is going on in the conversation. It describes Spark, a flexible XML based architecture that makes this possible and reports on a user study that shows how such avatars could significantly improve online conversations. © IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2004.