Cultural Diversity for Virtual Characters : Investigating Behavioral Aspects across Cultures

Culture plays a crucial role in our lives. Depending on our cultural background, we judge on and react to everything that we encounter. Subtle differences in behavior can lead to misunderstandings or even culture shock. In a similar manner, virtual characters can be declined by certain user groups when showing culturally inappropriate behavior. But how can social aspects such as culture be integrated into the behavioral models of virtual characters? Birgit Endrass addresses this question by carrying out a hybrid approach that is based on theoretical background from the social sciences as well as a multimodal corpus analysis, and exemplified the approach for the German and Japanese cultures. For this purpose, different methods from artificial intelligence and multiagent systems are applied and simulated with a virtual character system.

Birgit Endrass is a faculty member at Augsburg University, Germany, where she obtained her doctoral degree in 2012. During her PhD, she was supported by a grant from the Elite Network Bavaria (Elitenetzwerk Bayern). Her doctoral thesis received the Research Award of Augsburg University (Wissenschaftspreis der Universität Augsburg), and the prestigious IFAAMAS-12 Victor Lesser Distinguished Dissertation Award.