Behavior-Based Control of an Interactive Life-Like Character

1 Background In this document we describe a lifelike character Bouncy, which has been constructed in conjunction with a prototype developed for the STAGING project 1. The main objective of the STAGING project is to develop new multimedia tools to be used in theatrical productions. One ambition of this project is to create virtual actors that partake in a play in cooperation and interaction with real and other virtual actors. Thus a major issue in the project is related to how to construct and then autonomously control such lifelike characters. Not only does this ambition require the agents to act autonomously based on perception of their environment, it also requires them to perform their actions in a dramaturgically interesting manner. In short \It is not just what they do but how they do it". Bouncy is the character that we have developed for the rst of a series of such prototypes. The main objective with this prototype has been to provide a platform for one-to-one improvisational plays where the interaction between the human user and the lifelike character Bouncy has been the focus. In a nutshell, Bouncy is an animated autonomous lifelike character with which a user can interact through a multimodal multimedia interface. He is autonomous in the respect that its behavior is not a function of user commands and interaction only, it is also a function of its own intentions and desires. The focus of this paper is to describe how Bouncy is constructed with a major emphasis on it autonomy. To provide the context we describe the overall prototype system and its constituent components, in section 2. In section 3 we describe how Bouncy's \brain" has been constructed using a behavior-based approach and in section 4 a computational model of personality is described for Bouncy. The paper is concluded with a discussion of important issues in section 5.