Aesthetic Interleaving of Character Performance Requests

We have constructed a system that supports unscripted social interaction between a player and virtual characters, where the participants pursue internal agendas and respond to one another in real-time. Our emphasis on unscripted interaction means that the characters must accept dynamically generated performance requests, while our concern with social interaction implies that the characters must interleave performances with an attention to natural flow that encourages social engagement. We present initial work on a performance management mechanism that produces this interleaving. It initiates and suspends character performances by allocating animation resources to requests via a utility function representing aesthetic concerns. That function weighs extrinsic factors reflecting the purpose of taking an action against intrinsic ones that concern features of a given performance. We show, via multiple short videos, that the features are individually material to the aesthetic quality of the result and that the mechanism can produce aesthetically pleasing performances on par with the best hand-generated prioritization scheme. We argue, anecdotally, that the parameters of the model are easy to identify, suggesting that the feature vocabulary is both intuitive and useful for shaping character performances.