Towards a Conversational Interface for Authoring Intelligent Virtual Characters

Abstract

The collaboration between creatives and domain architects is crucial for bringing virtual characters to life. Domain architects are technical experts who are tasked with formally designing intelligent virtual characters' domain knowledge, which is a symbolic representation of knowledge that the character uses to reason over its interactions with other agents. In the context of this work, domain knowledge encompasses the mental modeling of the character. Although the creation of interactive narratives requires substantial engineering expertise, it is also necessary to pick the brains of writers, artists, and animators alike to give the characters a boost of peculiarities. This intrinsically collaborative and interdisciplinary process brings about the challenge of bridging different mindsets and workflows in an efficient and effective way. The conventional authoring process for virtual characters is heavily driven by engineering needs (shown in Figure 1a). This process burdens creative authors with inconsistent and cumbersome tasks, leaving little room for imagination and improvisation. As the intelligent system goes through updates, creatives are forced to adjust to new tools and take on new tasks in order to satisfy demands for creative input. Inconsistency and the lack of formality result in ineffective communication, repetitive tasks, underused data, and consequently, content of compromised quality