BASIC: A Believable Adaptable Socially Intelligent Character for Social Presence

Drawing inspiration from social science and psychology, a computational model of a personality model for a Believable, Adaptable, Socially Intelligent Character (BASIC) has been designed, implemented and tested to drive chimpanzees in a multi-agents scenario. The BASIC model can be customized to create different personalities that are able to trigger empathic responses in human spectators, otherwise known as social presence. A multi-room event driven scenario, where queues propagate the social interactions amongst the characters, demonstrates the social interaction capabilities of the model embodied within the graphic visual representations. The system is efficient and can run on any mid-spec PC with over ten personalities being fully simulated. The novelty of the approach lays in the factors combined in the personality model including mood, relationship-based memories, impulse based decision making, and gestural alteration through emotion. These are all steps towards the creation of virtual characters, able to elicit social presence. Keywords--Social presence, multi-agents, synthetic personalities, empathy.