Emotionally expressive agents

Abstract

The ability to express emotions is important for creating believable interactive characters. To simulate emotional expressions in an interactive environment, an intelligent agent needs both an adaptive model for generating believable responses, and a visualization model for mapping emotions into facial expressions. Recent advances in intelligent agents and in facial modeling have produced effective algorithms for these tasks independently. We describe a method for integrating these algorithms to create an interactive simulation of an agent that produces appropriate facial expressions in a dynamic environment. Our approach to combining a model of emotions with a facial model represents a first step towards developing the technology of a truly believable interactive agent which has a wide range of applications from designing intelligent training systems to video games and animation tools.