1. What Makes Characters Seem Life-Like? 1 Soft computing Laboratory Yonsei University October 1, 2004

2. What Makes Characters Seem Life-Like? 2 1. Introduction Some of the features that make characters seem life-like to the people who interact them Five Illustrative application Discuss each of the proposed qualities of life-likeness Discuss evaluation of life-like characters

3. What Makes Characters Seem Life-Like? 3 Improv Puppets –Modeled after traditional children’s puppets –Two kids directed the improvisatinal behavior of two puppets in a shared virtual world –Adorable animated behavior, voices to speak lines of dialogue by children, multi-dimensional moods –By children’direction, own decisions, dynamic moods, environmental events, normal variability 2. Five Illustrative Characters

4. What Makes Characters Seem Life-Like? 4 2. Five Illustrative Characters Erin the Bartender –Virtual bartender, working in her Uncle Spence’s virtual bar –Can describe, suggest, and mix hundreds of drinks, interleaves conversations with multiple customers, remember which customers are waiting for drinks –The average user spends 30 minutes with Erin, with 95% of interaction devoted to job-related social interaction and only 5% on testing the AI

5. What Makes Characters Seem Life-Like? 5 2. Five Illustrative Characters Virtual Jack –Designed to be the company mascot and web site host for the company Petopia and has rich back-story –Help customers navigate the web sit, encourage them to visit target web pages and acquire a dozen or so information items about each user –Increased visits to target marketing pages by two orders of magnitude. He built user loyalty leading to >30% repeat visits within 8 weeks

6. What Makes Characters Seem Life-Like? 6 2. Five Illustrative Characters Katherine, Interactive Newscaster –Offer personalized interactive news service on her own web site –She does not initiate social conversation and if personal questions, she will politely explain that her contract strictly limits her conversation topic –She is sensitive about her intelligence and takes offense easily if insulted in this area.

7. What Makes Characters Seem Life-Like? 7 2. Five Illustrative Characters STAR TM Workshops –Offer Virtual Coach and several Virtual Pole-Players to provide training and authentic rehearsal of interpersonal skill –Each STAR Role-Player exhibits a distinctive persona, appearance, and manner, and interacts with learners in natuaral language conversation, complemented by life-like gestures, body langueage, and emotions. –Significantly outperform alternative online method

8. What Makes Characters Seem Life-Like? 8 3. Seven Qualities of Life-Likeness Characters Should Seem Conversational –Should construct mixed-initiative dialogues with users. –Should construct multi-threaded dialogues with users. –Should have a natural limit to remember and complexity of conversations –Should reflect multiple layers of meaning

9. What Makes Characters Seem Life-Like? 9 3. Seven Qualities of Life-Likeness Characters Should Seem Intelligent –Must have something substantive to offer –Should follow the familiar admonition, do not start something you cannot finish –Should channel the conversation to its own areas of competence and depth –Must be prepared for the inevitable intelligence testing –Should shape constuctive user behavior and discourage disruptive user behavior

10. What Makes Characters Seem Life-Like? 10 3. Seven Qualities of Life-Likeness Characters Should Seem Individual –Should have distinctive back-stories, personalities, and emotional dynamics –Should reveal and express their personas in every aspect of their beings and behavior. –Interesting characters have idiosyncrasies and, sometimes, signature behaviors

11. What Makes Characters Seem Life-Like? 11 3. Seven Qualities of Life-Likeness Characters Should Seem Social –Should display self-awareness in the social context –Should develop an acquaintance gradually, in stages, and in coordination with their respective indentities as individuals and their complementary roles –Should built their acquaintance on a shared history and through discreet acquisition of information about users –Need to have episodic memory, including both short-term memory emphasizing within-session events and long-term memory emphasizing events whose implications persist across sessions

12. What Makes Characters Seem Life-Like? 12 3. Seven Qualities of Life-Likeness Characters Should Seem Empathic –Should have emotional responses to events and situation –Different characters should have distinctive emotional dynamics –Should display awareness of and empathy for the user’s emotion

13. What Makes Characters Seem Life-Like? 13 3. Seven Qualities of Life-Likeness Characters Should Seem Variable –Should avoid repetition, unless it is done for an intended effect, as in signature behaviors –Should introduce random, normally distributed variability in what, when, and how they act through all channels

14. What Makes Characters Seem Life-Like? 14 3. Seven Qualities of Life-Likeness Characters Should Seem Coherent –Should appear to be singual creatures, driven by persistent identity and manner, slowly evolving belief structure, and dynamic flows of correlated feelings, intentions, and focus of attention –Should display strong local coherence, with all aspects of their conversation, gesture, facial expression, and body language coordinated in the service of an immediate, but short-lived local focus of attention, and with clear transitional signals between episodes –Should display moderate global coherence, with persistent foundational elements of their conversation, gesture, facial expression, and body language coordinated in the service of an enduring persona

15. What Makes Characters Seem Life-Like? 15 4. Evaluating the Life-Likeness of Characters Turing Test –A computer can think if a person coversing with it over an anonymous communication channel believes that he or she is conversing with a human being A character is life-like to the extent that a person interacting with it suspends disbelief that he or she is interacting with a human being

16. What Makes Characters Seem Life-Like? 16 5. Conclusion The interdisciplinary study of life-like characters is in its infacy To become an enduring intellectual discipline and to support a practical commercial enterprise, the field needs a new level of theory and methodology