What Makes Characters Seem Life-Like? 1 Soft computing Laboratory Yonsei University October 1, 2004

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What Makes Characters Seem Life-Like?What Makes Characters Seem Life-Like?

What Makes CharactersWhat Makes CharactersSeem Life-Like?Seem Life-Like?

Soft computing LaboratoryYonsei University

October 1, 2004

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1. Introduction1. Introduction• Some of the features that make characters seem life-like to

the people who interact them

Five Illustrative application

Discuss each of the proposed qualities of life-likeness

Discuss evaluation of life-like characters

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• Improv Puppets– Modeled after traditional children’s puppets

– Two kids directed the improvisatinal behavior of two puppets in a shared virtual world

– Adorable animated behavior, voices to speak lines of dialogue by children, multi-dimensional moods

– By children’direction, own decisions, dynamic moods, environmental events, normal variability

2. Five Illustrative Characters2. Five Illustrative Characters

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2. Five Illustrative Characters2. Five Illustrative Characters• Erin the Bartender

– Virtual bartender, working in her Uncle Spence’s virtual bar

– Can describe, suggest, and mix hundreds of drinks, interleaves conversations with multiple customers, remember which customers are waiting for drinks

– The average user spends 30 minutes with Erin, with 95% of interaction devoted to job-related social interaction and only 5% on testing the AI

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2. Five Illustrative Characters2. Five Illustrative Characters• Virtual Jack

– Designed to be the company mascot and web site host for the company Petopia and has rich back-story

– Help customers navigate the web sit, encourage them to visit target web pages and acquire a dozen or so information items about each user

– Increased visits to target marketing pages by two orders of magnitude. He built user loyalty leading to >30% repeat visits within 8 weeks

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2. Five Illustrative Characters2. Five Illustrative Characters• Katherine, Interactive Newscaster

– Offer personalized interactive news service on her own web site

– She does not initiate social conversation and if personal questions, she will politely explain that her contract strictly limits her conversation topic

– She is sensitive about her intelligence and takes offense easily if insulted in this area.

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2. Five Illustrative Characters2. Five Illustrative Characters• STARTM Workshops

– Offer Virtual Coach and several Virtual Pole-Players to provide training and authentic rehearsal of interpersonal skill

– Each STAR Role-Player exhibits a distinctive persona, appearance, and manner , and interacts with learners in natuaral language conversation, complemented by life-like gestures, body langueage, and emotions.

– Significantly outperform alternative online method

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3. Seven Qualities of Life-Likeness3. Seven Qualities of Life-Likeness• Characters Should Seem Conversational

– Should construct mixed-initiative dialogues with users.

– Should construct multi-threaded dialogues with users.

– Should have a natural limit to remember and complexity of conversations

– Should reflect multiple layers of meaning

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3. Seven Qualities of Life-Likeness3. Seven Qualities of Life-Likeness• Characters Should Seem Intelligent

– Must have something substantive to offer

– Should follow the familiar admonition, do not start something you cannot finish

– Should channel the conversation to its own areas of competence and depth

– Must be prepared for the inevitable intelligence testing

– Should shape constuctive user behavior and discourage disruptive user behavior

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3. Seven Qualities of Life-Likeness3. Seven Qualities of Life-Likeness• Characters Should Seem Individual

– Should have distinctive back-stories, personalities, and emotional dynamics

– Should reveal and express their personas in every aspect of their beings and behavior.

– Interesting characters have idiosyncrasies and, sometimes, signature behaviors

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3. Seven Qualities of Life-Likeness3. Seven Qualities of Life-Likeness• Characters Should Seem Social

– Should display self-awareness in the social context

– Should develop an acquaintance gradually, in stages, and in coordination with their respective indentities as individuals and their complementary roles

– Should built their acquaintance on a shared history and through discreet acquisition of information about users

– Need to have episodic memory, including both short-term memory emphasizing within-session events and long-term memory emphasizing events whose implications persist across sessions

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3. Seven Qualities of Life-Likeness3. Seven Qualities of Life-Likeness• Characters Should Seem Empathic

– Should have emotional responses to events and situation

– Different characters should have distinctive emotional dynamics

– Should display awareness of and empathy for the user’s emotion

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3. Seven Qualities of Life-Likeness3. Seven Qualities of Life-Likeness• Characters Should Seem Variable

– Should avoid repetition, unless it is done for an intended effect, as in signature behaviors

– Should introduce random, normally distributed variability in what, when, and how they act through all channels

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3. Seven Qualities of Life-Likeness3. Seven Qualities of Life-Likeness• Characters Should Seem Coherent

– Should appear to be singual creatures, driven by persistent identity and manner, slowly evolving belief structure, and dynamic flows of correlated feelings, intentions, and focus of attention

– Should display strong local coherence, with all aspects of their conversation, gesture, facial expression, and body language coordinated in the service of an immediate, but short-lived local focus of attention, and with clear transitional signals between episodes

– Should display moderate global coherence, with persistent foundational elements of their conversation, gesture, facial expression, and body language coordinated in the service of an enduring persona

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4. Evaluating the Life-Likeness of Characters4. Evaluating the Life-Likeness of Characters

• Turing Test– A computer can think if a person coversing with it over an

anonymous communication channel believes that he or she is conversing with a human being

• A character is life-like to the extent that a person interacting with it suspends disbelief that he or she is interacting with a human being

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5. Conclusion5. Conclusion• The interdisciplinary study of life-like characters is in its

infacy

• To become an enduring intellectual discipline and to support a practical commercial enterprise, the field needs a new level of theory and methodology

Documents

What Makes Characters Seem Life-Like? 1 Soft computing Laboratory Yonsei University October 1, 2004