Life-Like Characters: Tools, Affective Functions, and Applications

Life-like characters is one of the most exciting technologies for human-computer interface applications today. They convincingly take the roles of virtual presenters, synthetic actors and sales personas, teammates and tutors. A common characteristic underlying their life-likeness or believability as virtual conversational partners is computational models that provide them with affective functions such as synthetic emotions and personalities and implement human interactive behavior. The wide dissemination of life-like characters in multimedia systems, however, will greatly depend on the availability of control languages and tools that facilitate scripting of intelligent conversational behaviour. This book presents the first comprehensive collection of the latest developments in scripting and representation languages for life-like characters, rounded off with an in-depth comparison and synopsis of the major approaches. Introducing toolkits for authoring animated characters further supports the ease of use of this new interface technology.

Life-like characters being a vibrant research area, various applications have been designed and implemented. This book offers coverage of the most successful and promising applications, ranging from product presentation and student training to knowledge integration and interactive gaming. It also discusses the key challenges in the area and provides design guidelines for employing life-like characters.

Prendinger is a JSPS Research Associate at Ishizuka Lab, sponsored by a Research Grant (FY1999-FY2003) for the Future Program («Mirai Kaitaku»). The prime focus of his research is technology underlying life-like characters for web-based interaction scenarios. His main interests are Artificial Intelligence, Human-Computer Interaction, Emotion-based and Socially Intelligent Agents. The top-level aim of his research can be called Social Computing which aims to support the tendency of humans to interact with computers as social actors. Here, the main task is to develop technology that reinforces the human bias toward social interaction by giving appropriate feedback. Prendinger's vision of social computing is effective and natural, or simply enjoyable communication between humans and computational devices.To implement the goal of social computing, he is involved in research about affective conversational characters (Social Intelligence), advanced character-based interfaces that use biosignals to recognize user emotions (Affective Computing), and interactive storytelling (Narrative Intelligence) The Personal Carreer of Professor Ishizuka:1971: B.S. in Electronic Eng., Univ. of Tokyo 1976: Ph.D. in Electronic Eng., Univ. of Tokyo 1976: Researcher, NTT Yokosuka Laboratory 1978: Associate Professor, Institute of Industrial Science , Univ. of Tokyo 1980-1981: Visiting Assoc. Professor, Dept. of Elec. Eng., Purdue Univ. 1992: Professor, Institute of Industrial Science, Univ. of Tokyo 1992-Present: Professor, Dept. of Info. & Commun. Eng., Faculty of Eng., Univ. of Tokyo 2001-Present: Professor, Dept. of Info. & Commun. Eng., Graduate School of Information Science and Tech., Univ. of Tokyo His research topics: Artificial Intelligence, Multimodal Lifelike Agents, Multimodal & Intelligent Media, Internet / Web Intelligence, Image Understanding / Synthesis