Towards believable interactions between synthetic characters

Abstract

Believable interactions between synthetic characters are an important factor defining the success of a virtual environment relying on human participants being able to create emotional bonds with artificial characters. As important as the characters being themselves believable is that the interaction with or between such characters is believable. In this work, we bridge affective computing and traditional animation principles to create 3Motion, a model for synthetic character interaction based on anticipation and emotion that allows for precise affective communication of intention-based behaviors. We present an exploratory study with 52 participants supporting that our approach is able to increase overall interaction believability.