Skip to main content

Formalising Believability and Building Believable Virtual Agents

  • Conference paper
Book cover Artificial Life and Computational Intelligence (ACALCI 2015)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 8955))

Abstract

Believability is an important characteristic of intelligent virtual agents, however, very few attempts have been made to define and formalise it. This paper provides a formal analysis of believability, focused on diverse aspects of believability of the agents and the virtual environment they populate, approaching the problem from the perspective of the relationship between the agents and the environment. The paper also presents a computational believability framework built around this formalism, featuring virtual agents able to reason about their environment – the virtual world in which they are embedded, interpret the interaction capabilities of other participants, own goals and the current state of the environment, as well as to include these elements back into interactions. As a proof of concept we have developed a case study, a prototype of an ancient Sumerian city (Uruk), where believable virtual agents simulate the daily life of its citizens.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 39.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 54.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Preview

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

References

  1. Bartneck, C.: Integrating the OCC model of emotions in embodied characters. In: Workshop on Virtual Conversational Characters. Citeseer (2002)

    Google Scholar 

  2. Bergmann, K., Eyssel, F., Kopp, S.: A second chance to make a first impression? How appearance and nonverbal behavior affect perceived warmth and competence of virtual agents over time. In: Nakano, Y., Neff, M., Paiva, A., Walker, M. (eds.) IVA 2012. LNCS, vol. 7502, pp. 126–138. Springer, Heidelberg (2012)

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  3. Bogdanovych, A.: Virtual Institutions. Ph.D. thesis, UTS, Sydney, Australia (2007)

    Google Scholar 

  4. Bogdanovych, A., Rodriguez-Aguilar, J.A., Simoff, S., Cohen, A.: Authentic Interactive Reenactment of Cultural Heritage with 3D Virtual Worlds and Artificial Intelligence. Applied Artificial Intelligence 24(6), 617–647 (2010)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  5. Bogdanovych, A., Simoff, S.J., Esteva, M.: Virtual institutions: Normative environments facilitating imitation learning in virtual agents. In: Prendinger, H., Lester, J.C., Ishizuka, M. (eds.) IVA 2008. LNCS (LNAI), vol. 5208, pp. 456–464. Springer, Heidelberg (2008)

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  6. Cunningham, D.W., Kleiner, M., Wallraven, C., Bülthoff, H.H.: Manipulating video sequences to determine the components of conversational facial expressions. ACM Trans. Appl. Percept. 2(3), 251–269 (2005)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  7. Dautenhahn, K., Ogden, B., Quick, T.: From embodied to socially embedded agents- implications for interaction-aware robots (2003)

    Google Scholar 

  8. Doyle, P.: Believability through context using “knowledge in the world” to create intelligent characters. In: AAMAS 2002: Proceedings of the First International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, pp. 342–349. ACM, New York (2002)

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  9. Egges, A., Kshirsagar, S., Magnenat-Thalmann, N.: A model for personality and emotion simulation. In: Knowledge-Based Intelligent Information & Engineering Systems (KES 2003), pp. 453–461 (2003)

    Google Scholar 

  10. Gandhe, S., Traum, D.: Creating spoken dialogue characters from corpora without annotations. In: Proceedings of Interspeech 2007, pp. 2201–2204 (2007)

    Google Scholar 

  11. Hartmann, B., Mancini, M., Pelachaud, C.: Implementing expressive gesture synthesis for embodied conversational agents. In: Gesture Workshop, pp. 188–199 (2005)

    Google Scholar 

  12. Heylen, D.K.J., van Es, I., Nijholt, A., van Dijk, E.M.A.G.: Controlling the gaze of conversational agents. In: van Kuppevelt, J., Dybkjaer, L., Bernsen, N.O. (eds.) Natural, Intelligent and Effective Interaction in Multimodal Dialogue Systems, pp. 245–262. Kluwer Academic Publishers (2005)

    Google Scholar 

  13. Howard, P.J., Howard, J.M.: The big five quickstart: An introduction to the five-factor model of personality for human resource professionals (1995)

    Google Scholar 

  14. Ijaz, K., Bogdanovych, A., Simoff, S.: Enhancing the believability of embodied conversational agents through environment-, self- and interaction-awareness. In: Reynolds, M. (ed.) Australasian Computer Science Conference (ACSC 2011). CRPIT, vol. 113, pp. 107–116. ACS, Perth (2011)

    Google Scholar 

  15. John, O.P., Donahue, E., Kentle, R.: The ‘big five’. Factor Taxonomy: Dimensions of Personality in the Natural Language and in Questionnaires. In: Pervin, L.A., John, O.P. (eds.) Handbook of Personality: Theory and Research, pp. 66–100 (1990)

    Google Scholar 

  16. Kelley, H.H.: The Warm-Cold Variable in first impressions of Persons. Journal of Personality 18(4), 431–439 (1950)

    Article  MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  17. Lee, J., Marsella, S.C., Traum, D.R., Gratch, J., Lance, B.: The rickel gaze model: A window on the mind of a virtual human. In: Pelachaud, C., Martin, J.-C., André, E., Chollet, G., Karpouzis, K., Pelé, D. (eds.) IVA 2007. LNCS (LNAI), vol. 4722, pp. 296–303. Springer, Heidelberg (2007)

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  18. Lester, J.C., Stone, B.A.: Increasing believability in animated pedagogical agents. In: Proceedings of the First International conference on Autonomous Agents, AGENTS 1997, pp. 16–21. ACM, New York (1997)

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  19. Livingstone, D.: Turing’s test and believable AI in games. Computer Entertainment 4(1), 6 (2006)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  20. Loyall, A.B.: Believable agents: building interactive personalities. Ph.D. thesis, Computer Science Department, Pittsburgh, PA, USA (1997)

    Google Scholar 

  21. Mateas, M.: An oz-centric review of interactive drama and believable agents. In: Veloso, M.M., Wooldridge, M.J. (eds.) Artificial Intelligence Today. LNCS (LNAI), vol. 1600, pp. 297–328. Springer, Heidelberg (1999)

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  22. Mori, M., MacDorman, K.F., Kageki, N.: The uncanny valley [from the field]. IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine 19(2), 98–100 (2012)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  23. Ortony, A., Clore, G., Collins, A.: Cognitive Structure of Emotions. Cambridge University Press (1988)

    Google Scholar 

  24. Ortony, A.: On making believable emotional agents believable, pp. 189–212. MIT Press, England (2003)

    Google Scholar 

  25. Rao, A.S., Georgeff, M.P., et al.: BDI agents: From theory to practice. In: ICMAS, vol. 95, pp. 312–319 (1995)

    Google Scholar 

  26. Riedl, M.O., Stern, A.: Failing believably: Toward drama management with autonomous actors in interactive narratives. In: TIDSE, pp. 195–206 (2006)

    Google Scholar 

  27. Tarjan, R.: Depth-first search and linear graph algorithms. SIAM Journal on Computing 1(2), 146–160 (1972)

    Article  MATH  MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  28. Tencé, F., Buche, C., Loor, P.D., Marc, O.: The challenge of believability in video games: Definitions, agents models and imitation learning, CoRR abs/1009.0451 (2010)

    Google Scholar 

  29. Thiebaux, M., Lance, B., Marsella, S.: Real-time expressive gaze animation for virtual humans. In: AAMAS (1), pp. 321–328 (2009)

    Google Scholar 

  30. Thomas, F., Johnston, O.: Disney animation: the illusion of life, 1st edn. Abbeville Press, New York (1981)

    Google Scholar 

  31. Trescak, T., Bogdanovych, A., Simoff, S., Rodriguez, I.: Generating diverse ethnic groups with genetic algorithms. In: Proceedings of the 18th ACM Symposium on Virtual Reality Software and Technology, VRST 2012, pp. 1–8 (2012)

    Google Scholar 

  32. Wallace, R.S.: The Anatomy of ALICE. APA. Springer, Netherlands (2009)

    Google Scholar 

  33. Weizenbaum, J.: Eliza—a computer program for the study of natural language communication between man and machine. Communications of the ACM 9(1), 36–45 (1966)

    Article  Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2015 Springer International Publishing Switzerland

About this paper

Cite this paper

Bogdanovych, A., Trescak, T., Simoff, S. (2015). Formalising Believability and Building Believable Virtual Agents. In: Chalup, S.K., Blair, A.D., Randall, M. (eds) Artificial Life and Computational Intelligence. ACALCI 2015. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 8955. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-14803-8_11

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-14803-8_11

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-14802-1

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-14803-8

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics