Bamse-land: a virtual theatre with entertaining agents based on well-known characters

The virtual theatre Bamse-land is an entertaining virtual world, where characters taken from the Swedish comic book Bamse are implemented as autonomous agents. The agents interact with each other according to their different personalities, which were derived from the comic. Our main concern has been to make an entertaining and believable application, and by keeping the algorithms non-complicated show that there can be easy solutions to the problem of designing believable agent applications. Experiences with users show that entertaining agents based on well-known characters bring many advantages, including a simplified design process and higher user involvement.