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System for authoring highly interactive, personality-rich interactive characters

Published: 27 August 2004 Publication History

Abstract

We describe an innovative system for authoring expressive, fully autonomous interactive characters. The focus of our work is creating a system to allow rich authoring that captures as much of the artistic intent of the author in procedural form as we can, and that provides automatic support for expressive execution of that content. The system is composed of two parts: (1)a programming language with unusual language features including concurrency, reflection, backtracking, continuously monitored expressions, and a model of emotion, that was created for the expression of interactive self-animating characters; and (2) a motion synthesis system that combines hand-animated motion data with artistically authored procedures for generalizing the motion while preserving the artistic intent. This system has been used to create over a dozen interactive characters, which have been shown at juried venues, as well as being deployed commercially. We describe how artistic qualities important to interactive characters are encoded and supported using this system, and demonstrate the system with an implemented interactive character.

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cover image ACM Conferences
SCA '04: Proceedings of the 2004 ACM SIGGRAPH/Eurographics symposium on Computer animation
August 2004
388 pages
ISBN:3905673142

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Eurographics Association

Goslar, Germany

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Published: 27 August 2004

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SCA04
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SCA04: Symposium on Computer Animation 2004
August 27 - 29, 2004
Grenoble, France

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Overall Acceptance Rate 183 of 487 submissions, 38%

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