Introducing the Cast for Social Computing: Life-Like Characters

Lifelike characters are one of the most exciting technologies for human– computer interface applications. They convincingly take the roles of virtual presen-ters, synthetic actors and sales personas, teammates and tutors. A common characteristic underlying their believability or life-likeness as conversational partners is computational models that provide them with affective functions such as synthetic emotions and personalities, and implement human interactive behavior or presentation skills. In social computing, a paradigm that aims to support the tendency of humans to interact with computers as social actors, lifelike characters are key. They may embody the interface between humans and computers, and thus improve the otherwise poor communicative capabilities of computational devices. The success of lifelike character applications today relies relies on the careful crafting of their designers, mostly programmers. The wide dissemination of lifelike character technology in interactive systems, however, will greatly depend on the availability of tools that facilitate scripting of intelligent lifelike behavior. The core tasks include the synchronization of synthetic speech and gestures, the expression of emotion and personality by means of body movement and facial display, the coordination of the embodied conversational behavior of multiple characters possibly including the user, and the design of artificial minds for synthetic characters. In this chapter we will first describe what lifelike characters are, and how they differ from related synthetic entities. We will then explain how lifelike character technologies may change and improve the interaction between humans and computers. Next, we report on some of the most promising character scripting and representation languages as well as authoring tools currently available. After that, the most successful lifelike character systems are briefly introduced, demonstrating the wide range of applications where embodied agents are at work. Some final remarks on this highly active research field conclude this introductory chapter.